


Tonight, I Dream in Technicolor

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captain America Movie Serials, Magical Realism, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, Pining, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Tiny Steve Goes to War, Trapped in a Movie, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 03:42:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5076451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve had concocted numerous highly imaginative scenarios for how he would reunite with Bucky once he finally made it into the army. There was: Bucky’s in a firefight, pinned down by German artillery, when Steve’s unit swoops in to save them, and Steve drops down next to him in the foxhole to ask nonchalantly, “What have you gotten yourself into this time, Barnes?”</p><p>or</p><p>Steve slides in next to Bucky in the mess, where he’s regaling his buddies with stories over chow, and says, “Is this seat taken?”</p><p>It was never: Steve’s leading a ragtag squad of international war-hero rejects, wearing a dead man’s jacket and helmet, accompanied by a paunchy actor in a Captain America costume with droopy tights and a goofy mask, and together they’re rescuing Bucky from the stronghold of a comic-book villain come to life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tonight, I Dream in Technicolor

**Author's Note:**

> The "period typical attitudes" mentioned in the tags is a notification that this story contains historically and geographically typical -isms, as well as some mentions of mental and physical health problems. Everyone learns to play nice pretty quickly, but most of this story takes place in 1943-44.
> 
> There are copious notes at the end about some of the story's inspirations if you find that sort of thing enjoyable. Many, many thanks to minim calibre for wrestling with this and cheerleading.

### 1\. The soldiers by the side of the road

**November, 1943**

The Paramount Theatre was half empty for the matinee showing--well, more than half, just a smattering of people further to the back and the smokers in the balcony where Steve usually sat, except today he wanted to be alone. He took another pull on his flask--Bucky’s flask, actually--and slouched lower in his seat, only half paying attention to the chubby moron on the screen who looked no more like Captain America, the Sentinel of Liberty, than Steve Rogers did. It might have been the booze talking, but the theatre felt odd today. As if some kind of electrical current was buzzing through his hands and up his arms into his head, or radio static was coming from somewhere nearby. When he glanced around, things would wobble in his vision, settling as soon as his eyes did, yet it wasn’t like being drunk--it was something more than that, but he couldn’t put his finger on what.

They’d almost caught Steve at the enlistment center this time, even though he’d gone up to the Bronx. He could well have ended up with his skinny behind tossed into a federal penitentiary, and wouldn’t Bucky have had kittens over that: “I can’t leave you alone for five fuckin’ minutes,” Bucky would say, and Steve would stick his chin out and tell him to fuck off. Of course, that was assuming they both survived long enough to see each other again. The gnawing dread that he wouldn’t see Bucky again was a persistent companion, it colored everything he saw. He leaned his head back against the seat.

All these tries and he was no closer to serving, to contributing, than he’d been before, and Steve was just--livid: at the doctors for not looking past his childhood illnesses, at himself for never getting past the first screening, at the world in general for being stupid and fucked up and _blind_. And now he was sitting in a cold theatre watching this jackass actor who didn’t even know how to throw a fucking punch or shoot a pistol or lead his own soldiers. It was infuriating. He didn’t even like serials, they always ended on cliffhangers so you’d come back for the next chapter; movies, Steve believed zealously, were only good if they had a happy ending.

Steve wondered if Bucky would be equally appalled at the way one of his favorite comic book characters was being portrayed in these stupid serials. They’d quibbled with the Buck Rogers pictures, and Flash Gordon too, but those, at least, were enjoyably junky compared to this travesty. The worst part was that they had actual soldiers with actual experience in this, the papers had made a big deal about that. Maybe they just weren’t good soldiers, though, if the brass had merely shuffled them off to Hollywood and the USO to drum up bond sales and make morale-boosting movies. What a joke. 

Steve sniffed and ran his sleeve across his nose. That creepy-crawly feeling was still bugging him, so he took another drink. On the screen, one of the soldiers was crawling on his belly toward enemy fire, and the stupid fuck playing Captain America was losing a fistfight with the leader of the German platoon. “Jerk,” Steve muttered. “Come to Brooklyn, ya fat boob, you wanna see how it’s really done.” 

The fella kept throwing ridiculous wide, loose roundhouse punches that allowed the other guy to get low and inside, belting him right in the gut. Captain America was supposed to be a superhero, not just a tall guy with broad shoulders and tree-trunk legs; he was supposed to look like he could hump a full rucksack on a twenty-mile march up a mountain in hot weather, but this guy looked like he wouldn’t last one mile without crying and begging for a beer. Steve scowled at the screen; his head felt peculiar, all tingly and glittery. Booze had never affected him this way before. Maybe he’d picked up some kind of flu or a cold.

The fight onscreen was over; one of the Howling Commandos, as they called them--what a stupid name--jumped down into a hole, clocked the bad guy with the butt of his rifle, and he and the actor moron shook hands. They went in the direction of the pillbox high on a ridge. Straight on, right up the middle along the forest road where anyone could see them, like they were going to hike right on in to the fortress of the evil villain. Clustered together, the fucking idiots. “Might as well put a big target on your foreheads, jerks,” Steve grumbled, and took another sip from the flask. The whiskey carved a smoky, fiery trail down his throat. “If this wasn’t a movie, you’d die, and you’d deserve to die for being that stupid.” Had no one involved with this asinine picture ever read a book about war or military tactics? Why put real soldiers in a movie if you just expected them to do stupid stuff?

The French guy, who was supposed to be a demolitions expert, took a small canister ahead as the rest of the guys crept forward. Except for paunchy Cap, who ran toward the pillbox and the Germans waiting to pick him off in his colorful costume and shield that might as well have been a blinking neon sign. Steve couldn’t get past the physical screening, but these Three Stooges rejects had actually seen combat, and Cap wouldn’t last a New York minute in an actual firefight. “Lousy good for nothin’ ass faces, is what you are,” Steve muttered bleakly, and guzzled some more whiskey. If he’d been half in the bag by the time the first newsreel had ended, he was pretty much sloshed by now.

“You think you can do better, shrimp?” someone asked. Steve blinked and glanced around. No one seemed to be looking at or speaking to him.

With a frown he sank back into his seat. That odd humming noise grew louder briefly, then faded, and it sounded--almost like someone was whispering his name, but he hadn’t seen anyone he knew. When he turned his attention back to the screen, one of the Howling Commandos was staring straight at the camera, challenging, defiant. That was...strange, not to mention disturbing. He took another gulp from the flask. At this rate he’d run out of whiskey before the second feature, but maybe he could drink himself into a stupor and fall asleep and never wake up. 

“Won’t give me a chance to prove myself, but they let this fat boob pretend he’s a war hero just ’cause he’s got broad shoulders.” 

“You got a fat mouth, junior,” the same person said, and this time Steve saw the fella on the screen--what was his name? Doogan or something? Doohan?--say it. _He looked straight at Steve, rifle angled in the other direction, as though they were right next to each other on the line. What the hell?_

Steve gawped. A quick scan of the theatre told him that no one else was noticing this. “Are you--are you talking to me?” Steve asked out loud, and laughed, a bit hysterically, because holy hell was he lit if he thought someone onscreen was talking to him.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you, you lippy little fuck,” Dooley or whatever said _to Steve_. “You think you can do better in this piece of shit production, why’n’t you come over here and prove it?”

Over--here? Come over where and prove what? “What?” Bucky would have died laughing if he could hear Steve now, none of his usual snappy retorts at hand. 

Up on the screen, the rest of the squad moved forward, yet the Doofus guy with the bowler hat--who wore a bowler hat in the middle of a war? what an ass--remained stock still, waiting for Steve to respond. 

This was funny. When Steve got this drunk before, he’d usually ended up in a fight with some jerk in a bar, the kind of guy who’d be crude to a lady or try to throw his weight around and hurt someone. But he’d never _hallucinated_ someone. Maybe he was being a fat-mouthed bastard, and he should just give in to the delusion and shut up. Bucky’d always said he had more rage bundled up inside him per square inch than any other fella on earth, and alcohol made a pretty effective lubricant for letting it out.

“I said,” bowler-hat guy snarled, with a look that would peel paint, “if you’re such a smart guy, how ’bout you step over here and show us what you got? Unless you’re afraid you don’t got what it takes.”

Afraid? “You wanna shut up?” Steve said, and vaulted over the two rows in front of him to the lip of the stage. Steve stumbled up the stairs onto the stage, standing in front of the screen; Doofus’s face was so large he couldn’t see anything except his stupid walrus whiskers and sharp white teeth. It took Steve a few seconds to stop swaying.

“Oh yeah, you’re real leadership material,” the guy said and laughed at Steve. 

Not one person in the theatre appeared to see this; in fact, they seemed frozen, in a trance. Steve’d heard that there were Nazi spies in New York, and fear flickered through him--what if this was some kind of experiment in mass hypnosis? What if they were all drugged? Shit, what if he was being experimented on?

“Chickening out?” the guy taunted, and that did it, Steve balled up a fist and sent a hook straight for his giant black and white lip, except--his arm went right into the screen. Not through. Into. Steve lost his balance and teetered forward. 

There was a bright white light and the whoosh of a train entering a tunnel, then he was on his face in the dirt, not a wood stage. In his peripheral vision he saw a pair of booted feet. “Not so lippy now, are ya? Maybe you should stay down where you belong.”

Steve clambered clumsily to his feet and looked around. There were no theatre seats full of people behind him. He was on a--this must be what a soundstage looked like. He’d seen pictures in the movie-star magazines Ma loved. Steve dusted his hands off; he didn’t know what else to do except prepare for a fight, because his mind couldn’t take in what was happening. “Nah, I could do this all day,” Steve said, and put his dukes up. 

“Man, you’re even tinier than I thought. I don’t want to fight you, I’m way outside your weight class, kid.”

“Kid, my ass!” Steve snapped. His head felt like a box full of bees. This place was huge, with painted trees and shrubs all around, a painted bunker on top of a fake ridgeline. Behind him was a rolling walkway, to his left large cameras, director’s chairs, cables. It was big enough to park an airplane in, spooky, hollow, echoing. A shudder ran through him but he kept his fists up. “How--how is this happening?”

“Beats me. We’re in the middle of filming this goddamn movie and I hear you bellyachin’ and calling Cap a fat boob--not that he’s not a moron, just like every preening actor in this fucking town, but still--and I can _see_ you too. It’s a little insulting, listening to that. I just wanted you to shut the hell up. Most people would have shut up, they hear someone talking to them from the screen.”

“I ain’t most people,” Steve responded and dropped his fists. 

“No, you aren’t,” the guy said with a feral grin. 

“But I--I was in a theatre. A _movie_ theatre, not the kind where you should have been able to hear me. And how could I be--here? Am I--where am I? I was in New York. Is this Hollywood?” The guy nodded. “This has to be in my imagination. Why am I here?” He turned around and around in circles.

“Beats me.”

The rest of the soldier-actors circled around them, and Steve put his fists up again, ready for a fight. They made no moves, only stared at him, open-mouthed, except for Captain America’s actor, who was blowing his nose. “That wind machine plays havoc with my sinuses,” he moaned.

“Who--and what--the hell is this,” the Japanese fellow asked. Steve hadn’t been paying enough attention to the movie to remember any of their names, though he thought it was Merino or something. Neither he nor the French one were much taller than Steve, and it made him see red again to think he was being shut out of the service because his size was a liability. Well, okay, maybe they also rejected him because of the asthma and heart problems, but still. Both of these guys were the size of fireplugs. 

“This is the mouthy little shit in the theatre we kept hearing,” Doogal said. “Thinks he can do better than us when it comes to soldiering on film.”

“Is he impugning our verisimilitude?” the English guy asked. Falstaff or something.

“Vera Similitud?” Doogal asked. “Didn’t I date her once? Geez, she had a set of knockers that’d make you weep.”

Jones shook his head--his name was definitely easy to remember. “Cripes, Dugan, you’re a piece of work. Verisimilitude: the appearance of something being real or true.” He had a warm grin that Steve instantly took a liking to, there was a quality about him that reminded Steve of Bucky. At least now Steve knew his antagonist’s name--right, it was Dum Dum Dugan. Steve had read a couple articles about him. What was the name of the little French guy--oh, right: last, final. Dernier. 

Mordina--Morchiba?--threw his hands up in the air. “That’s what you’re choosing to talk about? We got a fucking scrawny little asshole standing in front of us who was sitting in a theatre a few minutes ago griping at us, and no one’s concerned that this might be a little FUBAR?”

“Mass hysteria?” Falstaff suggested. 

“This can’t be real. I’m just drunker’n I thought I was,” Steve said. His chest was getting really tight, beads of sweat popping out on his face. Little pinpricks of pain sparked through his lungs as he tried to get them to open up. Oh shit. He sat down hard on the ground, clutching his ribs, attempting to suck in a plegmy breath but air only struggled through. He hadn’t had an asthma attack in a long time; he absolutely couldn’t afford to have one now. He had fucked up, catastrophically fucked up. Everything was fucked up.

“Oh, geez, kid, what the hell?” Cap said, dropping down beside him. “You got asthma? My kid sister has that. You sound just like her.” He pushed gently on Steve’s back, sitting him up straight and rubbing little circles. Steve loosened his tie with shaking fingers. “Just breathe in through your nose, and then back out through your mouth, real slow. Don’t give it a chance to take hold.” Now Steve felt kind of terrible for calling him a fat boob; Steve generally didn’t judge people by their physical appearance, the way he’d been judged his whole life. “Nice and calm, just keep calm, don’t panic.” He might have been a terrible actor and a terrible fighter, but he had a nice voice and it was calming, a lot like the way Bucky used to talk softly to him when he got anxious. Panicking made everything worse. “My sis, she’s got one of those nebulizer things at home now.”

He’d long wished he could have afforded one of those; even getting the doctor for a shot when his attacks were bad enough was more than they could handle financially. Not to mention that many of them said it was a mental disease, which was pretty hard to get past. “Must be nice,” Steve wheezed out. He’d like to try one. “The shots are painful,” Steve added breathlessly, “and I have bad side effects. So I mostly try to tough it out.” He coughed. “And my ma and my best friend always helped. My ma’s a nurse.”

“Yeah, wasn’t cheap, but these gigs pay pretty well.” They sat for a few more minutes until Steve could sense the tightness slowly draining away. When he eventually looked up, three of the fellas were gone, and Dugan and Dernier were staring at him like he was something they’d scraped off their shoes. 

“Hey,” Jones said from the back, his voice reverberating through the space, “if we’re making a movie” --he came closer, hoisting the huge gun he carried over his shoulder-- “where the hell did the crew go?”

“Nobody over this way,” the other two called out at the same time. “Where the hell did they get to? Did they call for a break?”

Steve stood, shaky, and rubbed his temples. This just could not be happening. It could not be because he was drunk. This was a prank, someone had set him up.

“Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice,” Falstaff intoned. Dernier squinted at him and muttered, “ _Non, mais je rêve._ ”

“This is insane! I gotta get back to the theatre!” Steve said around a racking cough. The rising panic he’d felt before was nothing like this, now it was crashing around his head in heavy boots, clutching at his chest with talons. Something was telling him _get out now_. On wobbly legs he walked back to the place he’d landed with his face planted in the dirt and felt around. There was nothing there, no hard surface like a door, no opening, no...nothing. “How do I get out of here?”

“Kid, we don’t know how you got _in_ here!” Dugan shook his head.

“Stop calling me kid! I’m twenty-five fucking years old!”

“Well, I can’t help it if you got a baby face and you’re the size of my six-year-old niece.”

Steve reflexively balled up his fist. But this was no time for a rhubarb, he had to get out of here. All the other guys were moving off to search the soundstage. Captain America, however, sat on his flabby bottom. “If I’m not getting paid for this, I’m not moving. This isn’t in my contract.”

Rolling his eyes, Steve made for the nearest Exit sign, hidden behind a screen and a stand of “trees” made of papier-mâché. They weren’t very well done, Steve could absolutely do better himself. Once he was out of this farce, he should look into making backgrounds for the pictures studio in New York.

The door wouldn’t budge. A bubble of hysteria rose up his gullet. For a few seconds he kicked ineffectually at the door till Dugan hauled him back, and said, “Watch out.” He took out a Colt pistol--it certainly didn’t look like a prop, it looked like the authentic weapon of a soldier in the field--and shot at the door latch. It still wouldn’t budge. 

“Oh God,” Steve moaned. 

“Now, now, don’t get your bitty bloomers in a bunch.”

When this was over, Steve was going to hunt Dum Dum Dugan down and skin him alive. Steve made for one of the other exits where Jones was bashing around trying to break it open. That one didn’t seem any more cooperative. Steve glanced wildly around--none of the other guys were having luck, either. Shit shit shit.

By now he could hardly breathe, he was cold and clammy, undershirt soaked in sweat. They were all darting glances at each other. Maybe they blamed him and they would try to kill him. They’d been in combat, after all.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Mortita said. “We were just filming before we started hearing the shrimp’s voice. Same as always.”

Steve glared. 

“Hey, Gardner,” Dugan called, “get your fat ass off the ground and help us here.” Right, the actor’s name was Grant Gardner. Good to know. He grumblingly stood. “Someone’s messing with us. This has to be some kinda prank. What were we doing before we heard wheezy here?”

Gardner straightened his uniform. Steve went back to disliking him again for turning a comic book hero into such a ridiculous clown. “Our direction was to make an assault on the stronghold of Johann Schmidt. I believe in our last take, Dernier was going to ‘blow’ the base of the pillbox and kill the soldiers preventing us from doing that.”

“You cannot go straight up the middle like you’re walking up the aisle at church. It was ridiculous. You guys were soldiers, you should know better.” Steve sniffed. He could feel a nosebleed coming on from the stress. 

“Oh, we can’t, can’t we?” Gardner said and put his hands on his hips in an attempt to strike a heroic pose. Though he had the broad shoulders of a hero, it was hard to look valiant with his gut pooching over the waistband of the tights. 

“Kid’s got a point,” Mortita conceded. Steve wasn’t sure that was the right name, but he wasn’t going to be here long enough to worry about it. He hoped. 

“You’re not exactly the captain here,” Steve said. “You don’t even know how to carry that shield and you can’t fight to save your life. You’re supposed to be fighting Nazis, for Christ’s sake.” 

“It’s a picture. I’m an _actor_ ,” Gardner huffed. Steve’s opinion of him kept moving south.

“You’re supposed to be--I don’t know, boosting morale and making people feel like our guys overseas are going to be okay.” God, Steve suddenly thought, what if Bucky wasn’t okay? What if Steve was stuck here in some kind of strange, nutty science fiction world and he’d never know what happened to Bucky, he’d never find out why he hadn’t had a letter from him in weeks? The backs of his eyeballs stung and his throat was tight. Shit. If he hadn’t been so jealous of Bucky getting to serve, if he hadn’t been so determined to prove that he was equal to the task... 

They all sighed in unison. “Say. What if we went back to filming exactly what we were filming before we heard his voice, just got back to business?” Jones asked. “Maybe everyone would come back and whatever’s going on would be...broken.”

“What, you mean like break a spell in a fairy tale?” Dugan said derisively. “That’s nuts.” 

Falstaff scoffed for added emphasis.

“I’m just throwing out ideas here! This is completely crazy. If you’ve got a better idea to get us out of here, I’m all ears.”

Dernier shrugged expansively and said, “What it would hurt?” For the life of him, Steve could not figure out what that guy was doing with a group of American soldiers on a USO tour and making pictures in Hollywood. 

“All right, then, let’s try it--back into positions, men,” Gardner said, and they took the positions they’d been in when Steve had arrived. Which were, he realized, not the same positions they were in in the movie. They’d been talking to him from inside a movie that had been filmed months ago, yet they’d heard him in here. What the ever-loving fuck was going on?

Steve wasn’t sure what to do with himself, so he trotted along behind the actor. “And...action!” Captain America shouted, as Dernier went sneaking through the fake trees toward the far end of the soundstage.

There was something peculiar about the backdrop, though--the perspective had changed. Maybe it was his artist’s eye, but what had seemed close a few moments ago had now receded, and the rest of these mugs probably didn’t notice. Everything, and everyone, in the foreground looked puny, as if the landscape had been enlarged. This was giving Steve a decided case of the creeps; he shuddered again, the metallic tang of fear in the back of his mouth. 

After watching the Commandos and Cap for a few moments, Steve couldn’t stand it anymore. He snuck up alongside them. “You have to go up either of those small hills to the left or right. You’ll be less exposed. They’re not likely to have painted embrasures on either end of the pillbox, they’ll be concentrating the guns on the center. They probably wouldn’t have bothered painting them in. I know it’s just a movie, but you should do it right.”

Eyebrows were raised all around, but Dugan seemed to agree, making hand signals to move them off toward their soundstage objective. Steve waited, looking around. He’d hoped that Jones’s plan might work, that filming would have--resumed, he supposed, or at least somehow his presence wouldn’t have brought everything to a screeching halt and caused everyone to disappear. But nothing happened. Still, the fellas kept moving toward the backdrop--only, they should have been right on top of it by now. It too was receding. That awful squeezing on Steve’s chest came back. 

Captain America bellowed at them from about forty feet ahead, encouraging them to move forward. But to a man they had all stopped, staring at the bunker and its backdrop. “Did someone...move that thing when we weren’t looking?” Jones asked. The look they all had on their faces reminded Steve of the one Bucky got the morning after a bender, when his eyes were squinched nearly closed and he cringed against the light, face a sickly yellow-green. 

“All right. Stop. This has officially given me the worst case of the willies I’ve ever fuckin’ had,” Dugan said. 

Falstaff pursed his lips. “I feel as if someone’s just walked over my grave. A whole host of someones, in fact.”

“Now, see here, men,” the boob said, and everyone groaned. God, you could get sick of that guy really fast. “We stick to the plan. It’s only been a few minutes. There has to be some sort of sensible resolution to this, and unless someone can come up with a better plan than Private Jones’s, we push forward.” 

“Did you miss the part where everyone seems to have disappeared and the backdrops are moving?” Morita--Morita! that was his name!--said. “No thanks, chief, I’m not moving a muscle till you convince me I’m not trapped in a bughouse. Kid, what did you do?”

Steve glowered. “I told you, I was just watching the movie, and I was a little soused and a lot angry, and so I--”

“Why were you getting drunk in the theatre?” Like that had something to do with it.

“What difference does it make?” Steve snapped. Morita only stared at him hostilely. Steve remembered the guy’s story now, he’d been awarded a Silver Star for Sicily, nearly lost his life. He was not a guy to be trifled with. Steve hesitated, then said, “I got 4Fed, again.”

“Again?”

“I may have tried to enlist a few times before. But they keep rejecting me.” He stuck his chin out, daring them to say something about it.

“You know that’s illegal, right?” Jones asked. Steve rolled his eyes.

“What, they keep rejecting you because you’re a shrimp? I’ve seen lots of guys your size over here. Hell, you’d fit real nice in a ball turret, the air force could use a little spitfire like you.” Dugan grinned. “Or stick you behind a desk so you can boss people around. I bet you’d like that.”

“You may have noticed my breathing difficulties back there. Asthma’s not the only thing they shot me down for.”

“I’ll say,” Falstaff muttered, giving him a disdainful look, one that Steve had seen a thousand times before. “Issues of character?” 

“Hey!”

“You can’t blame him for saying that.” Morita tilted his head and glared. “If you weren’t sozzled and feeling sorry for yourself, would we even be in this mess?”

“I didn’t cause this! How could I cause this? What do you think I am, a magician or something? How do I know this is even real? Or that one of _you_ didn’t cause this?” Given the circumstances, it was probably not a good idea to antagonize them, but his agitation was growing by the minute. “Maybe one of you is making this happen. Black magic or something.”

“If you’re implying that this is some sort of voodoo or other bigoted bullshit--” Jones said, eyes narrowed.

“Well, if we’re talking people with suspicious motives,” Dugan cut in, “we gotta include everyone--” and his eyes were focused right on Morita.

“I’m from _Fresno_ , ace,” Morita sneered, pulling his dogtags out of his shirt. Dugan made a face. Great. It was apparently not enough for them to hate Steve and Gardner, they hated each other, too.

“Maybe the lad’s right. What do any of us know about anyone else?” Falstaff said, and next thing Steve knew, he was facing down a pack of barking dogs, snarling and gesticulating at each other. Racial epithets and slurs about nationality were flying, insults about people’s looks. This was wonderful. Not only was Steve trapped on the other side of the continent in the middle of a motion picture, but the people he was trapped with wanted to kill each other, and were perfectly capable of doing so. 

“ _Enough!_ ” Steve shouted with every bit of volume he could muster. They stopped and stared at him. Bucky had always said he was a force of nature when he got pissed off like that, but he was still a little stunned that it worked. “We will not accomplish anything if we descend into insults and slurs and petty threats. We have to work together to find a solution. I don’t believe I belong here any more than you do, but bickering and quibbling and insulting people’s skin color or heritage or size will not solve this.” Steve could feel his neck and face turning pink with shame for calling the actor a fat boob in the theatre, and he really didn’t have the high road here if they wanted to call him on it.

Dugan raised his eyebrows, glanced over at Captain America. “Maybe the kid here ought to be doing your job.”

Gardner scrunched his mouth up in disapproval and huffed, but didn’t argue. Well. The first step was up to Steve.

He stuck his hand out. “I’m Steve Rogers.” Each of them shook hands with him as he said, “I’m from Brooklyn, New York--that’s where I was when I was watching the picture--and yes, I’ve been trying to enlist since Pearl Harbor, but they won’t take me. I was a little plastered in the theatre because of that, and because I haven’t heard from my best friend, who’s probably in Italy, for quite a few weeks.”

They each introduced themselves in turn--Falsworth! that was the English guy’s name, not Falstaff. Now he knew who everyone was.

“All right, now that we’ve got that settled, why don’t we sit down, get something to eat over there, and see what else we can come up with for a way to get us all out of this,” Jones said. “A little break might do us all good.”

Dugan pulled a flask from his pocket. “I’d say it sounds like my kind of plan.” Steve patted his pocket to check that his own flask was still with him. What if that ended up being the only thing he had left of Bucky? He touched its cool surface, all at once feeling depressed and small and very, very lonely.

At the far end of the soundstage, past the cameras and the props, there were tables set up with food. The coffee was cold, but at least there was enough that all of them could have a cup. It was so eerie--the air was moving as though they were outside in a breeze, yet it was completely silent inside. And it kind of smelled like fish.

The group pulled up folding chairs, sitting in a semicircle. Steve had never seen people eat like that--they were ravenous, shoving things into their mouths like they hadn’t eaten in months. He just picked at his tiny little perfectly cut sandwich, stomach roiling. Maybe he’d lost his mind, maybe his overweening desire to enlist had driven him mad. The actor, who seemed as if he would be the most likely of them to lose his grip, was more puzzled than panicked, and Steve couldn’t help wondering: if he’s not losing his marbles about it, did that mean it wasn’t real? This was the kind of thing that you _saw_ at the movies, you didn’t end up _in_ the fucking movie. Not unless you were nuts.

Steve was getting up for more coffee when he heard a noise from the direction of the bunker painting. Jones, Morita, and Dugan leapt up, their plates falling to the floor. They drew their service weapons, Morita laughed and whacked Dugan on the arm. “We don’t have real bullets, remember, Einstein?” 

As the rest of them stood, listening and scanning the stage with their eyes, Steve stood as well. Gardner lost the puzzled look, visibly working himself into a tizzy. At least he had his fake mighty shield in case of trouble--Steve didn’t have so much as a trash can lid, but he could flip one of the tables, he supposed. He was pretty sure. Somewhat.

“Is it--is it my imagination, or does it look like that thing isn’t a painting anymore?” Jones asked, staring at the pillbox. 

“Yeah, that’s...new,” Dugan said.

“What the ever-loving fuck?” Morita added. 

Steve gawped. The bunker had become three-dimensional, and the depth of the ridgeline and hills it was set into now had the shadows of a real landscape as twilight fell around them. Well, okay, Steve thought, it’s finally happened. Confirmation that I really am out of my mind.

“Have we all gone barmy at the same time?” Falsworth asked. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know, but my contract definitely doesn’t cover this,” Gardner said. Steve dropped his head and sighed. At least he knew he wouldn’t be the weak link if shit hit the fan.

There was a loud bang, and something whizzed past Steve’s head. Jesus! His body went numb with shock. All the fighting men hit the dirt, but Gardner and Steve were just unseasoned enough to remain standing until Jones and Morita yanked them down hard onto the concrete floor. “That was a bullet, moron,” Morita snarled. 

“Fall back! Fall back!” Gardner shouted, and started crab-walking backwards toward the potential safety of the cameras. For fuck’s sake. Even Steve knew that was too exposed, so he jumped up and knocked the food off one of the tables, flipped it over, and shouted at everyone to get behind it. It wasn’t exactly sturdy, but at least it was cover. The other guys flipped the second table over and snugged it up behind the first. A few more bullets sang past their heads and tore into the wall. 

“Who the hell is firing on us?” Morita said breathlessly. “We were the only ones here a minute ago.”

“And where the fuck did they get real bullets?” Dugan added.

Steve tamped down his panic and ran through it in his head--the movie he’d been watching in the theatre, and the movie he’d stepped into here. There had been at least four German guns pointing out of the embrasures in one shot. “Wait. If that pillbox backdrop has suddenly become real, and someone up there is firing real bullets, then are you sure your guns don’t have real bullets too?”

Dugan’s very expressive eyebrow shot up his forehead. “You’re a clever little fella, Rogers, I’ll give you that.” Captain America snorted. Steve noticed he was keeping his shield behind him and reached over, tugging it around front, because it wasn’t going to do him much good if bullets flew at his chest. Honestly. The guy should know that, he’d been playing Cap for four chapters now.

Dernier aimed his .45 at the coffee urn and fired three times, sending up a spray of brown liquid and metal shrapnel. He stared at them, wide-eyed, as Morita shrugged and muttered, “Okay.” 

Well, Steve thought glumly, I wanted to see action. I wanted to lay down my life. The men took up positions behind the tables, waiting. It was bleakly, dementedly laughable: they were taking _enemy fire_ from what was a piece of scenery for a film, inside a soundstage in Hollywood. If this was a dream, Steve couldn’t wait to wake up; if he was nuts, he couldn’t wait to see the doctors. 

“I’m not even sure what to do here,” Dugan said. “We have no idea who’s firing at us, where they’re firing from, or even if any of this is real.” That was depressing--as corporal, he was the highest-ranking real soldier they had here.

“I think we should--” Gardner began in his best upright hero voice, and Steve quickly cut him off with a “whatever it is that you’re going to suggest, that’ll just get you killed. You’re exposed up there, there, and there,” Steve said, pointing to the small hillocks flanking the ridge. Although there were trees, there weren’t enough to provide good cover. There would also be barbed wire to contend with.

“If that position is really a German defense position,” Steve said, “there’ll probably be communication trenches linking all their points. Just big enough for someone to crawl from position to position without exposure. I think we can get those guys--even with as few of us as we got. If we move carefully, we can infiltrate--once we’re up the hill we use those communication trenches to protect ourselves from any enfilading fire. Then we can get inside them from behind, unobserved. Uh, hopefully. Even with this amount of firepower, we should be able to take that pillbox.” 

They were staring at him, open-mouthed. “How the hell do you know what infiltration and enfilade are, professor?” Dugan asked. “Thought you never went to boot camp.”

“I read a lot. _The Battle Is the Pay-Off_ is the latest book I read. Captain Ralph Ingersoll? _Field Tactics._ Colonel Burr’s _The Framework of Battle._ Academics like to quote Clausewitz, but I tend to favor Jomini’s _The Art of War_ , which I feel informs modern American strategy much better. You want me to go on?”

Falsworth and Morita shook their heads, laughing. “You are a fucking pistol, Rogers,” Morita said.

“I’m much more inclined to hold to General Fuller’s indirect approach, which is why you should be on your bellies, sneaking on up there.” Steve smirked.

Captain America cleared his throat. “I strongly object to such a foolhardy plan. As the ranking officer here--”

“Oh God,” Jones groaned, “you’re not an officer. You’re a spoiled actor who’s never seen a second of combat. It’s an honorary title.” Huh, Steve thought, the comics had yet to reveal Captain America’s true identity; all they knew was that he was a corporal at Camp Lehigh when he wasn’t on the supersoldier clock. What if by being in this picture, they were changing the story? Of the comics, too? 

_Jesus fucking Christ, stop thinking about this! Someone is shooting at you!_ Steve ran his hand through his hair, waiting to see if they would accept the plan.

Dernier spat out a stream of French that Steve couldn’t follow. They didn’t teach him what he was pretty sure Dernier was saying in school. Jones laughed and slapped Dernier on the shoulder.

“You are easily my least favorite co-stars ever,” Gardner grumbled. “I’ve seen some of the next installments’ scripts. That knowledge would give my ideas merit, certainly. If everything that’s happening is based on what we’re filming, my orders in the script would absolutely work.”

“Those scripts were written by a bunch of hacks who _also_ had no combat experience and who’ve only ever written crime melodramas and potboilers. All’s they did was file off the details and substitute Nazis for mobsters so you could chase ’em around wearing tights and punch their mugs in,” Dugan said and looked over at Morita. 

“Can’t add anything to that,” Morita said. 

“ _He_ doesn’t have combat experience!” Gardner said, pointing at Steve. “Just because he read some books. I’ll have you know--” Gardner began, before a fusillade raked the air above their heads. 

“Holy shit!” all of them yelled in unison and ducked. 

“We can’t just sit here and do nothing,” Jones said breathlessly. “I’m with the fireball, let’s do it. Let’s do what he says.”

“You want us to attempt to take out at least four Germans with machine guns on a protected ridgeline with only the weapons we have, and we don’t even know what’s--or who’s--behind it?” Falsworth asked, his eyes wide.

“Yeah. Pretty much,” Steve said. These guys were good soldiers, he knew that now. They only required objectives, something to focus on.

Falsworth smiled, his eyes twinkling, and he glanced at Dernier, who seemed deliriously happy for some reason. “Sounds rather fun, actually. Bit of a Boys’ Own adventure.” He picked up his Sten machine gun and scrambled for cover behind some of the trees off to their right. Morita and Jones shrugged, then shouldered theirs and followed.

Dugan looked at Steve, suddenly stern and military. “You stay here. We don’t have any extra guns or ammo, and I want you to stay safe. Whatever made this happen, it’s clear you’re at the center of it, so don’t do anything stupid.” He pointed at Gardner. “Give him that shield.”

“I think I should stay here for protection,” Gardner said. “With him.”

“And I think you should come with us,” Dugan ground out, leaving no room for argument, and handed him his Colt revolver as he pulled the 12-gauge shotgun off his back. Dernier grabbed hold of Cap’s cowl and tugged. The men crawled, walked, and ran across the soundstage as the occasion demanded until Steve lost sight of them, working perfectly as a unit. 

Steve should have been terrified, yet he wasn’t--what he felt was more anxiousness and curiosity than anything. There was that electric energy buzzing through him; everything seemed so real, so vivid, as much as he knew it couldn’t be. He waited, and waited some more. In the distance--that in itself was so bizarre as to be incomprehensible, considering they were inside a building with four walls--Steve heard a muffled explosion, gunshots, shouting in German and in English, but he couldn’t make out the words. What if they all died? Then what was Steve supposed to do? He rubbed his face. Hell, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do even if they _didn’t_ all get killed. 

Or maybe...maybe Steve was the one who was dead. God, what if the reason he’d never see Bucky again was that he had been hit by a bus or drunkenly fallen and hit his head or... All this time he’d thought it would be Bucky dying in combat. The theatre and Bucky’s flask and the movie and this changing scenery could all just be some death dream, some last dying light before he found out which afterlife he was meant for. He should have paid more attention in Sunday school.

Steve glanced at his watch. The fellas had been gone for a really long time, and it was scarily silent. Eventually the jitters were so bad that he knelt to peer over the table. Holy crap--if he’d thought things were weird before, his brain couldn’t even really take in what he was looking at now. 

The walls on all three sides of the building had completely vanished. Night was falling, a faint purple dusk filtering through the trees--real trees, all of them. The floor underneath the table, shit, underneath _him_ was no longer concrete that had been carefully covered in movie dirt and prop shrubs--it was actual grass-covered ground and real, three-dimensional plants. Steve stood up and turned slowly, his heart hammering in his chest. _Please be there, please be there_ , he thought, searching for the cameras and equipment. 

Behind him was only twilit sky and vast, rolling blue hills. He squeezed his eyes shut quickly. _Oh shit_. When he opened his eyes, everything else was gone--the tables, the chairs, the food--replaced by a fallen pine tree. All he was left with was the shield. Steve hefted it in an attempt to make himself feel a little less vulnerable. Fat lot of good it would do him, it was lighter than a trash can lid. 

A loud boom behind him sent Steve about three inches into the air, heart thundering in his ears. At this rate, he’d have a heart attack before a bullet could catch him. Squinting into the distance, Steve saw the fellas heading toward him--every one of them, thank God--carrying what looked like a bunch of submachine guns and rifles. Dernier was dragging an ammo crate behind him, and Falsworth had a handful of German stick grenades. 

“Well, the good news is,” Dugan said cheerfully, “we’re loaded for bear now, and the bunker’s down, along with the Germans. The bad news is, we’re in Italy.”

### 2\. This is the long-distance call

Steve raised his head up from between his knees, pretty certain he could breathe without gasping now. Jones was still patting his back and talking to him in soothing tones. With a shaky hand, Steve rubbed at his eyes, and Jones smiled encouragingly before passing him a canteen of water. They would need to find more of that, and some food, soon. 

It was cold here at night, really fucking cold, and all Steve had was a thin little jacket and threadbare trousers. God, Bucky would have murdered him for wandering around Brooklyn without his winter coat anyway, but now he was--where? up past Naples maybe, Dugan had said, and Christ almighty, how was that even possible? 

“Come here,” Jones said and put his arm around Steve. They were huddled up in the boughs of the fallen pine tree but it wasn’t any warmer, not really. He tucked himself into Jones’s side as close as he could, just like he’d have done with Bucky, and let Jones put his knit cap on his head.

“Thanks, Jones,” Steve said, and Jones smiled fondly.

“I think if we’re snuggling up together, you can call me Gabe. Everyone does. I never saw myself as a last name kind of fella.”

“Thanks, Gabe.” 

“Tomorrow we’re gonna need to find you some kind of winter clothing. Maybe we can get you a uniform, too, so you don’t get fired on by accident. Though how the hell we’re going to explain you, I don’t know. Or Cap for that matter.” He rubbed Steve’s arm briskly. “You should try to sleep. You almost had two asthma attacks in one day, and you didn’t exactly seem like the healthiest guy to begin with. Not to mention the shock of all this.”

“I doubt I can sleep. This is just too...” He wasn’t even sure what to say, or whether he needed to. They all had to be as bewildered and miserable as Steve was. 

“Too too,” Gabe said, and laughed. 

“Were you in Italy, before?”

“Yeah. Well, sorta. Started out in North Africa, like everyone else, and got as far as Sicily before my CO finally found a way to get rid of me. He’d always wanted to send me off to a Colored unit to make his bigoted ass more comfortable, but when the brass wanted to take me and Dum Dum off the line for publicity, he jumped at the chance. Big heroes, they kept telling us, we’d be great for morale, him and me. We didn’t know that meant making these Captain America serials and doing the USO tour till we got to England. At first it seemed nice, you know, a ritzy hotel and hot chow and showers. But it’s hard to forget about the boys back there. The guys we left behind.”

His gaze was far away, a poignant reminder of Bucky. What must Bucky be going through, out there in the cold and the mud? Steve couldn’t afford to cry, though he felt himself getting choked up all the same. If he allowed himself that luxury it would start him down the road to coughing, which would lead to having trouble breathing, which would lead to his lungs seizing up. Out here he might die.

“What about the other Howling Commandos?” The Allied push into Italy had seen terrible attrition. If all of them had served here, what must they be thinking now? Blaming Steve for dragging them back into an abattoir they’d thought they were safe from, no doubt.

“Well, I think Dernier and Monty met a while ago, under some kind of mysterious circumstances involving the Free French and the Red Devils. Don’t know if it’s classified or not. But I bet you could get Dernier to tell you if you scrounge up a bottle of brandy. He seems to love brandy.” Steve thought his schoolboy French probably wouldn’t get him very far if Dernier got drunk enough that he forgot his English.

Steve laughed. “I’ll do my best.” With a superstitious urge he put his hand to his chest pocket, on Bucky’s flask. “What about Morita? I’d read that he was some kind of hero, too.”

“You’d never hear him say it, but yeah. Saved a lot of guys. But a Japanese fella, he’s got a lot to prove, you know? Even more hostility toward him than there is for me, and that’s saying a lot. So Jim probably didn’t think twice before throwing himself into action to save his squad. They were gonna send him home with the decoration and his wounds, but he wanted back in, heard about a Japanese unit they were putting together. Instead they put him here. That’s all I know.” Steve’s neck was hot; he’d been so self-righteously angry about how he’d been treated by the military, but Gabe Jones and Jim Morita would have had it so much worse--able-bodied yet scorned and feared. And Jim’s family was probably imprisoned in an internment camp right now.

“You guys don’t seem to like Grant Gardner much,” Steve noted. 

Gabe scratched his cheek. “I suppose...it’s just hard to come back to the normal world, you know? And we’re still in the military, all of us except Jacques--we don’t really get to see our girls or our families, and we have to play pretend soldiers. Don’t get me wrong, some of the attention when we were touring was really great, the ladies love you when you’re famous, but we’re stuck in a strange place--not really soldiers, but not out of the army. We all thought it was gonna be a hoot. Then we get this guy who’s never seen a moment of service buying into his role and talking down to us like he thinks he really is some government-issue supersoldier, well, that just burns the hide off of you, you know?”

“I can imagine,” Steve said. He gazed up through the trees at the stars, trying to note the position of the constellations he recognized. The sky appeared different here, the stars all askew, and Steve sighed raggedly. Bucky could have told him what he was actually looking at, how to tell where he was. “But I guess you’re stuck with him, and with me.”

Gabe chuckled and raised his eyebrows. “At least you got a good head on your shoulders.”

“I do?”

“Sure. Kept your cool when nothing made any sense and we were being fired on. You got good ideas. Even if we did call you a lippy shit.”

“I _am_ a lippy shit. Even my best friend says so.” Bucky was gonna clobber Steve halfway to Sunday when he found out Steve was here.

“That the guy you were wasted over?” Even if he’d known Gabe better, Steve couldn’t tell him about his feelings for Bucky. Hell, he couldn’t even tell Bucky about his feelings for Bucky. Just kept it shoved down so deep inside him it was like poison, festering in his guts; how agonizing their parting had been, watching the person he cherished most slip from his grasp and unable to express his yearning. How much Steve craved the letters that were the lone thread still tying him to Bucky. 

“Yeah. Well, sort of. It was partly because of the enlistment center almost catching me this time, and because I haven’t heard from him. If you met him, you’d like him, I bet. Everyone does. Maybe you will meet him here.”

“Stranger things have happened.” They looked at each other in the darkness and burst into laughter. It was such a relief to laugh, to see Gabe smile like that. Almost made Steve think maybe there was a way out of this. “I really think you should try to sleep. Seems to have settled down now that we’re here. Wherever we are.” 

Steve let Gabe tug him in tighter. He didn’t have that many more clothes to protect himself from the cold than Steve did, but he was certainly a lot healthier. This was what Bucky used to do for him, and Steve’s throat got tight again, his head starting to ache.

It was impossible to sleep, and Steve could tell Gabe was equally unable to relax. He said softly, “Do you like it, though, being movie stars? It must be nice, like you said, being out of the action, not being fired on. Well, till today.”

“Aw, you know, Captain America’s the one who gets all the attention. But I suppose if we were getting the extra pay that’d make us all feel more like movie stars.”

“They’re not paying you?”

“We’re still in the army. When we’re not filming, we’re training and keeping up our skills.”

“That seems sorta unfair.”

“You said it.” He paused for a really long time, and Steve thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. “Though I suppose with all this, it’s a damn good thing we did. Imagine the past few hours if we’d gone soft.”

“I think...I think I’ve gone insane. Or I’m dead, maybe. That you guys are a figment of my imagination.” His shaky, weak voice betrayed his fear, but talking to Gabe felt a lot like talking to Bucky and he couldn’t hold back.

Gabe jostled his shoulder, just the way Bucky used to. “I don’t know. I think I’m pretty real.”

“But wouldn’t you all say that, if I was nuts? Or dead and just imagining you? That’s what I’d imagine you saying.”

With a laugh, Gabe answered, “Yeah, I suppose so.” 

Years ago Steve’d read a story in one of Bucky’s _Weird Tales_ , about a guy who realized that everyone he knew was gradually beginning to speak a language he couldn’t understand. By the time he grasped what was happening, he could no longer communicate with anyone, even his wife and family. The kicker was that it wasn’t the other people who had changed, it was him, and they were terrified of him, believing he’d been turned into a monster. The world around Steve was melting away, shifting and changing to become something unrecognizable to him. But what if it was Steve who was changing? What if the rest of the world wouldn’t even recognize him anymore? What if he found Bucky, but Bucky didn’t know him? Steve shuddered, nausea surging inside him. Gabe thought he was cold and rubbed his arm some more.

They were quiet again, and Steve lost focus at last. The next thing he knew, his arm was being patted and Gabe was peering down at him. “Time to wake up, soldier.”

Steve rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?” Gabe had laid his jacket over Steve’s front somewhere along the line, his arms were tucked up inside, crossed over his chest like a man in his coffin.

“Oh eight hundred. Wanted to let you sleep as long as you could. I’m afraid we got nothin’ for breakfast. So we need to start humpin’ it in some direction till we can figure out where we are.” The ridgeline that they’d been fighting to take in the movie set was now completely gone, and they were surrounded by mostly open ground of hillocks and stream beds, and stands of trees off in the distance. Not much cover if they were discovered by German ground troops or aerial reconnaissance. “Do you think you can do it?”

Steve fought the instinct to get his back up about what was a perfectly reasonable question. “I’ll give it my best. If I slow you down, you fellas have to go on without me.”

Shit, that sounded so melodramatic, like something Cap’s actor would say. He shot Gabe a sheepish look and stood up, dusted himself off. He offered Gabe his hat back, but he waved it away.

The other fellas joined them and Dugan looked him up and down. “Think you can do this, tiny?”

Now, that did rankle. “Try me,” Steve snapped. Dugan only laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Here,” he said, and handed Steve his Colt revolver. Cap must have given it back to him after they’d taken the German guns. The weight of it was substantial; he wondered if he was strong enough to fire it one-handed. 

But Steve kept his concerns to himself and stuffed it in his pocket as they started off, Falsworth explaining that they were moving northwest, where he hoped they’d find Allied troops. They each seemed to have different competencies, and Steve could see why someone thought they’d make a great team, even if it was kind of crazy to waste good soldier material on morale-boosting movies and bond-selling tours. They didn’t talk much at all, just hiked along, taking in the scenery. His mind was rotten with a thousand different worries, yet the one thing Steve couldn’t seem to stop thinking about was how he’d kill for a deli. He should have forced himself to eat when he had the chance.

Even Cap’s actor appeared to have settled into this, as though they might as well make the best of it because it simply was what it was. They eventually found a road in a little valley, just a one-lane dirt path, but it was taking them away from the woods and Steve thought that had to be a good sign. Maybe they would find civilization soon, though he had no idea what form that might take, since this could very well be behind one of the main German lines. 

Eventually they stopped to rest by some aspen trees, and Gabe shared his canteen with him. Morita’s head was drooping forward, so Dugan poked him. “I’m awake! I’m awake.”

“Sure wish we had some of those uppers they used to give us right about now. Could use the boost.” Dugan sighed like he was remembering a girlfriend’s lips. “Maybe I’d be less likely to want to eat my boots, too.” 

“They give you amphetamines?” Gardner asked, shocked.

“Sure,” Morita shrugged. “Gotta keep you going out in the field.” Gardner stared at him and scratched his head under the cowl. It seemed ridiculous that he wore it up, but Steve supposed it was cold enough--and no one out here gave a damn how he looked.

“Me, I’d just settle for the maggotiest, stalest K-rations you could find,” Gabe said. “I’m _hungry_.” At least Steve wasn’t alone.

“Even powdered eggs--” Falsworth didn’t have time to finish his sentence, because they were interrupted by a voice crying out in the distance. It sounded like a banshee wail. Everyone dropped to the ground except Gardner; Morita reached out to grab him by the seat of his little shorts and yanked. Gardner squawked as he fell forward into the tall grass. 

“Where’s it coming from?” Steve whispered. It was hard to pinpoint direction out here in such vast open spaces. Nothing like the city, where if you stopped and listened carefully, you could catch sound bouncing off the buildings.

Falsworth waved two fingers toward the right. There was a slight rise there, gradually gaining height in about one hundred feet. Whoever had screamed was quiet now. They waited, Steve thought possibly to see if anyone came over the rise. “Should we check it out?” he asked.

“Couldn’t tell what language that was,” Dugan said.

Dernier said something to Gabe in French that Steve could only barely make out--Dernier didn’t think that was in any language at all. Just pain. The hair on the back of Steve’s neck stood up. There was a way they all had of looking at each other Steve was beginning to comprehend, an unspoken communication only soldiers would know, expressing their concerns and doubts. They had only the weapons they’d brought with them into this weird pageant, and two of the group had no fighting experience: not worth the risk. Stay here, or go around.

“I’ll go check it out,” Steve said. 

“Nuh-uh,” Morita said, “not on our watch. Even if you aren’t the main reason this whole disaster is happening to us and you’re what holds it together, we’re not gonna let you risk your life.”

“You guys said it yourselves! I’m tiny. I’m lower to the ground, I can get a look around, be back before you know it. Honest, this is the kinda thing I’m good at.” Complete and utter bullshit, of course, but he had to try. He ran his hand through his hair. “Though I don’t suppose any of you fellas have a scope or a pair of binoculars.”

Morita quirked an eyebrow and reached into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Here you go, sport,” he said and handed Steve a collapsing scope, shrugging like it was no big deal. 

“This is German,” Steve said.

“Yeah, I found it on a battlefield,” he said, and touched the side of his nose. 

“You know how to fire that gun?” Dugan asked. Steve understood the basics, so he nodded, but he’d never fired a gun in his life. He glanced quickly at Gardner, who seemed--embarrassed, maybe, that Steve was stepping up on this rather than the hero Captain America.

Steve gave them a nod and walk-crawled his way up the rise, sort of the way he and Bucky used to do it when they played Cowboys and Indians and wanted to spy on their enemies. As he got to the crest he paused and took a deep breath, then shimmied forward on his elbows, the gun in his right hand and the scope in his left. Down below was a series of smaller hills pocked with foxholes and craters, and farther off in the distance a narrow river, rushing heavy with fall rains. Two American jeeps and one large truck sat in smoking ruins; to the left there was another jeep, he couldn’t see its condition. Tank tracks scored the muddy earth in all directions. Steve pulled out the scope and scanned the area: he couldn’t see any live German soldiers or artillery, only American weapons and the vehicles--and a lot of bodies wearing U.S. Army fatigues. 

For a second he thought he might puke, but he pulled himself together and shimmied back down the way he came, crouching to run the last few yards, breath rasping out of his lungs with a sound like sand in gears. “I see at least a dozen G.I.s on the ground, no telling if they’re alive or dead. No Germans that I can see. Tanks have been here, and there are these holes everywhere. They must have been fired on with something huge, much bigger than mortars. On the left about sixty feet over the rise there’s some small cover, we can make it down part of the way there. I say we go in teams, you three provide overwatch”--he pointed at Dugan, Falsworth, and Dernier--“while the rest of us make our way to the bodies, then follow when we give the all-clear.”

They all smiled at him, except for Gardner. “Now, see here,” he started, as they groaned in unison. “I’m not trying to be Captain America, men! I’m not. If the kid wants to go, that’s all right. But I’m telling you that I think we should discuss this more. Not rush in and get ourselves killed for people who might already be dead themselves.”

Gardner wasn’t being unreasonable, Steve knew. But whatever they decided, Steve was going anyway. If even one of those fellas was alive, he owed them that much. Hell, maybe that was why he was here, maybe there was some kind of divine plan at work that he was in this particular place, right now.

Morita pulled his rifle out of the scabbard. “I like slick here’s plan,” he said, grinning at Steve. He had a funny, kind of lopsided smile.

“Me, too,” the other guys said and began their way up the rise, Gardner huffing and puffing with resentment behind them. Steve didn’t really know hand signals yet, but he could guess what most of them meant. There was no resistance, it was unusually quiet except for the sound of the river further away. The first few soldiers they reached were dead, their lifeless eyes staring at the sky, and an overwhelming grief for them hit Steve so hard he thought his chest would crack open. This is what he’d been so eager to sign up for, what Bucky had signed up for. What if Bucky was lying somewhere else in Italy just like these boys, his eyes staring up at nothing, no one to even close them for him? Steve’s hands shook, lip quivering as they went from body to body.

“This one’s alive,” Gabe said, motioning for the rest of them to hold cover as he and Steve and Dugan bent to help him. He was young, so much younger than Steve, with dark hair and brown eyes, his face caked with mud and blood. There was a large wound on his abdomen, and he couldn’t breathe. The name on his jacket said “Baum.” 

The boy spoke weakly to Dum Dum, trying to report what had happened, but it didn’t make sense. “They hit us again, those fucking blue lights and they picked off the ones they didn’t get the first time.” 

“What unit are you with, soldier?” Dum Dum asked gently. He really was a nice guy, when push came to shove, Steve thought. He cared about these kids, just like a good corporal should. 

“The 107th,” Baum said. “What was left of us, anyway. They got all our guys...” He tried to sit up, so Dugan slipped an arm underneath him and lifted.

“The 107th?” Steve nearly shouted, and was immediately met with a punch on his shoulder and a harsh “keep it down” from Gabe. “What company? Did you know Sergeant Barnes?”

They were probably staring at him, dumbfounded at this burst of emotion, but Steve didn’t care. His heart hammered so forcefully behind his ribs his breath was choking off. Oh, Christ on a crutch, the last thing he needed was a goddamn asthma attack. The ground spun beneath their feet, his eyes crossed and he steadied himself on Gabe’s arm.

“Able Company, yeah. He--they--before--” the boy coughed and Dugan waved at Steve to leave them alone.

“Jim, get over here, this guy needs help,” Gabe said. Steve reluctantly stood up and took Jim’s covering position at their three o’clock. 

They’d been hit before, the guy said, and Steve’s blood froze inside his veins. That meant Bucky was _gone_. 

What if...what if Bucky really was dead and it wasn’t just one of Steve’s catastrophic fantasies? Not just captured but dead and no one would ever even know, would they? There would be no body and no effects and... Oh God, he was going to heave. Steve knelt down and put his head between his knees. 

“What the hell, Rogers?” Dugan asked. 

“I think I’m gonna puke,” Steve mumbled into his jacket. 

“Let’s move the injured and infirm over into those trees, how about,” Gabe suggested. As the others lifted Baum, Gabe gave Steve a helping hand. 

“You wanna tell me what’s going on?” Gabe asked, forcing Steve to sit on a log and take deep, slow breaths. 

“That guy, is he gonna be okay?” Steve asked in an attempt to change the subject.

“Jim’s a pretty decent medic, I hear.” The sour stare Gabe was giving him made it pretty clear he wasn’t letting Steve off the hook.

“He said--he said the 107th. That’s Bucky’s unit. He said he knew Bucky.” This was all Steve’s fault. He wasn’t even sure how, but it was, it had to be. Bucky was dead and these guys were going to die, they were all going to die out here because of him.

“Listen,” Gabe said. “You can’t get worked up like that. You don’t know yet. This whole thing’s so messed up that you can’t assume you know anything.” Gardner sat down next to him.

“Your buddy, huh?” He was trying very hard to be Cap-like, so Steve gave him a wan smile. He may have been aggravating as all hell, but at least he was trying. They _were_ all in this together. “Maybe we could focus on doing something useful,” Gardner suggested, “see if we can scrounge up some food that’s not burned in those jeeps or that truck over there. Fill the canteens.”

“And I hate to say this,” Gabe said, “but I think we need to get you a jacket. Both of you. And helmets, some weapons.” Gabe gave Gardner’s tights and the cowl a disparaging glance.

At first Steve didn’t understand, but then he followed Gabe’s sightline out to the field and said, “Oh.”

It was hideous work, but they found two jackets that weren’t too damaged, and helmets. They took the time to cover the soldiers’ faces as best they could. Steve wanted to ask if they could bury them, but he knew what the answer would be: there wasn’t the time or manpower. In the truck they found a couple of charred but not too damaged boxes of K-rations, even more assault rations.

Steve was numb, standing amidst these boys who were younger than he was, all dead, alone on the ground in another country. And the rest of their brothers taken God knew where to have God knew what done to them. Stabbing pain crept up behind his eyes as he attempted to keep himself together. This was not at all what he’d had in mind when he’d tried to enlist. To fight and willingly lay down his life had seemed noble and right, not squalid and profane. It was what Bucky had tried so hard to pound into his head, even as Steve had insisted that he saw warfare for what it was, not as something romantic or academic. Well, now he was seeing that ugly reality, clear as goddamn day, surrounded by real blood, real bullets, and real bodies.

“Rogers,” Falsworth said, and put his hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Why don’t you talk to Private Baum and find out what you can about your chum. He’s making a bit more sense now. Also, Morita would like your tie.”

Baum’s shaking had stopped--as had the bleeding--and he was sitting up, eating one of the assault ration bars. Morita had done a really good job patching him up, considering they had almost nothing to work with. Steve knew a thing or two about dressing wounds. He slipped his tie from around his neck and handed it to Jim, who wrapped it around a nasty arm wound Steve hadn’t noticed before.

“How’d you find a civilian?” Baum asked when Steve knelt down in front of him. 

“Stray we picked up along the way. It’s a really strange story,” Dugan said. 

“You said before that you were with the 107th,” Steve began. He wanted to hurl himself at the guy and grab him by the collar and beg him to tell him anything he knew about Bucky. “That you knew Sergeant Barnes. He’s--was--is a friend of mine.”

“Yeah. Able Company. I saw him around, we were both from Brooklyn. We learned to ski and snow-shoe together, how to start frozen trucks and jeeps. Nice fella.” Steve swallowed. He remembered Bucky’s letters from Camp McCoy about those very things. He thought he might puke again, and bit the inside of his cheek to quell the nausea.

The private searched his face, could tell that this meant something to Steve. “The SSR, they got hit a while ago. The Germans had kidnapped a scientist, a real important guy, they said. So we--our company, we got sent after him. Some special unit, not regular Nazis, they call themselves Hydra. A--a few days ago, we got caught by a German ambush. Able was hit the hardest--they were getting slaughtered and we were behind with the artillery, but by the time we got there they were--they--” Steve glanced at Dugan and mouthed, “SSR?” Dugan shook his head.

Steve put his hand on Baum’s shoulder. “Take your time.” 

Baum swallowed, staring past Steve’s shoulder. “When we got there, they were taking the ones who weren’t injured or dead away. Only...they weren’t regular Germans. They were wearing these--these--helmets that covered their whole heads, and some of them--they had these things that looked like flamethrowers only they shot this blue lightning and our guys just _disappeared_ in a ball of blue light. And the really spooky thing was, there were no regular German soldiers around. Like they’d all vanished, too.” Baum put his hand over the wound and curled his fingers around it, running his other hand through his hair. “We tried to stop them, but we couldn’t. So we regrouped back at the CP ’cause a bunch of us, we wanted to--we were trying to find them. There’s no telling what the Krauts must have done to them by now. They must have figured the rest of us would be coming for them, there were patrols, maybe they were looking for more guys they could take away and--”

“You got caught here,” Falsworth said. 

“Yeah.” He put his head in his hands. 

“Did you hear anything about where they might be going?” Steve’s voice was edged with desperation. 

“I got knocked out from a grenade. Before it went black I heard them saying something about a--a red man and a factory. I speak a little German, not a lot. A red head or a...face. It didn’t make any sense. Prisoners, they said. That was all I understood, I blacked out and then I woke up and you guys were here.” He stared at Captain America, then cast his eyes back to Steve.

“A red skull?” Gardner asked, and Baum nodded his head.

“Yeah, yeah, it could be _skull_.”

Steve stood up. “We have to go after them. Follow their tracks, just like these fellas were doing.” Steve sounded hysterical, but he didn’t care. This was Bucky they were talking about.

“Now, see here,” Gardner said, and the entire group moaned as one. “No, listen. We can’t go off half-cocked, like this, we need to plan.” He rolled his eyes when they shook their heads in disgust, hefting his shield. A small, petty, desperate part of Steve wanted to take that shield away from him and bash him over the head. “Did any of you actually _read_ the script?”

Baum’s eyes darted back and forth. Boy, if they all thought this was madness after being in it for hours, what must it look like to someone else?

“I read _my_ lines,” Morita said and shrugged. The men glanced away in guilty silence--so they’d each read only their own lines as well. Criminy.

Gardner sighed. “If you’d read the script for the next three chapters, you’d know that we were heading to the fortress factory of the evil Johann Schmidt, also known as the Crimson Skull. He used a formula created by Doctor Reinstein--”

“Doctor Reinstein, yes, we know,” Gabe said. “The guy we were supposed to be rescuing, right?” Steve had missed parts two and three in the theatre, which apparently contained some useful information. “I don’t get what that has to do with this.”

“The same formula, basically, that created Captain America in the comic books was used by Schmidt to turn himself into an übermensch. A superhuman. But it also made him more evil.” Steve half expected a “dun-dun-DUH” to accompany that line. “He’s been trying to re-create the serum ever since. He’s built his own army within the German military, called Chimera, and they kidnapped Dr. Reinstein to that end, to force him to make more supersoldiers to crush the Allies with, just like him.” He put his hands on his hips; it almost looked heroic, despite the fact that he was wearing someone else’s too-tight jacket and a pair of red pirate boots. 

Baum was trying to follow the conversation. “I don’t know about no Reinstein. The guy’s name was Erskine.” That made sense, Steve thought. The comics gave him an alias.

“Didn’t _any_ of you read the goddamn comic books? The Crimson Skull is the exact opposite of Captain America. He’s my arch-nemesis!”

“That’s...patently ridiculous,” Falsworth said. 

“We’re standing in the middle of Italy with a skinny little guy who came through a movie screen. Twenty-four hours ago we were on a soundstage in Hollywood filming the next installment. You tell me what’s more ridiculous.” He held his hand out, palm up, and shook his head.

“He’s got a point there,” Morita said and shrugged. 

“So, you’re saying this doctor chap is real. You’re telling us we ought to follow the script and head off to find this factory, rescue the doctor _and_ the 107th? You’re telling us that living a film wasn’t enough of a punishment, now we’re inside a comic book.” Falsworth was so dry he could suck all the humidity out of the air. 

“This is cuckoo,” Morita said. “But I’m in.” 

“Wait!” Gabe said sharply. “Do you hear that?” Steve, with impaired hearing in his right ear, didn’t hear a thing at first. “Trucks.”

“That sounds like our boys,” Dugan said. He cocked his head. “Yeah, that’s us.”

“Don’t--” Steve tried to hold him back, but Dugan was already walking into the clearing. Sure enough, Dugan and Gabe were right: four large trucks, two of them towing trailers and one towing a jeep with a missing wheel, rolled to a stop a hundred or so feet past their position on the dirt road. 

One of the drivers leapt out of the forward truck. “Who are you guys? What the hell happened here?”

“We got one wounded and the rest are KIA,” Dugan said, walking toward the driver. By the time Steve caught up, they were shaking hands. “Some of ’em are from the 107th. What unit are you?”

“We’re headed back to command from a resupply, about ten miles from here. Fourteenth Armored, Forty-eighth Tank Battalion Service Company.” A couple other guys jumped out of their trucks and joined him. “What the...” one of the guys said, staring at Captain America and then at Steve, eyes practically bugging out of his head. “What in Sam Hill are you supposed to be?”

“I’m Captain America,” Gardner said. The Commandos groaned. “Well, I play him in the films.”

“You mean the comic books fella? Runs around punching Nazis in the kisser?” The soldier’s skeptical eyes traveled up and down Gardner. Someone behind him said, “Nice boots, Tinkerbell.”

“Let’s just say we’re a special squad,” Dugan said and grinned.

Steve reined in the laugh that threatened to erupt. He must look ridiculous in street shoes and trousers and a helmet that was at least a size too big. “Hey, we seen that movie, the first chapter,” another guy said and pointed. He narrowed his eyes. “What the hell you doing in Italy? You supposed to be on a USO tour or something? Where are the dancing girls?” Someone wolf-whistled from far back in the line.

Dum Dum cut the chatter off. “You got room in those trucks for the bodies? And would you be willing to leave us that jeep? We got an important mission to complete.” Dugan glanced over at Steve, gave him a nod. “Our injured kid says his unit’s about twenty miles back that way. But we’re heading the opposite direction.”

The first driver scratched his head, knowing that meant they were heading way past the Allied lines. Above his cab’s back window, the words “Suicide Kid” were painted in white. He wore corporal’s stripes, and looked like he was completely wrung out. Steve felt for him, so young and yet ancient, worn down by everything he’d seen. “Yeah, yeah. You could take one of the good wheels offa one of those”--he nodded in the direction of one of the burned-out jeeps--“and I guess we could give you some of this ammo.” He motioned at one of the guys, who ran back to forage around in his truck. “We got some spare gear here, too, somewhere. Your...uh, civilian looks like he might need it.” He had a look on his face, somewhere between disbelief and resignation. _You and me both, buddy, you and me both._

The truck drivers brought everything they could spare: ammo, more weapons, a few fatigues, and for Steve, the most important thing, a pair of well-worn boots that were too big but that Steve was terrifically glad to have. Gabe tossed Steve the extra socks--a commodity worth more than gold out here, Steve knew--and grinned. A couple of the Commandos unhitched the jeep and started replacing the wheel. If these truck drivers had any idea what the Commandos were about to do, they might not offer them this help, because it was the kind of insanity no sensible soldier would get behind. Hell, if they’d been attached to an actual unit, they might even be at risk of court-martial.

Steve and Dugan helped Baum into one of the trucks as the men finished loading the bodies into another. They dropped their heads and said a silent prayer, and a few of the men crossed themselves. As the trucks started up, the fellow who’d called Gardner Tinkerbell leaned out his window. “Hey! You might need these,” he said as he tossed two rucksacks out, and Jim caught them. The rucksacks were full of rations, probably the last of their own, and now they would go hungry unless they reached the CP soon. He hadn’t seen Morita smile like that since this whole thing had started. 

The Suicide Kid driver leaned out his window and asked, “You sure you fellas know what you’re doing?”

“Well, I’ve knocked out Adolph Hitler over one hundred times,” Gardner said, and rattled his shield. The driver laughed.

“You want us to let anyone know your position?”

Who the hell could they report to? The guys glanced at each other and shrugged. “Just let ’em know someone’s finishing the job these poor guys started.” Dugan gave the corporal a smart salute.

“Good luck,” the driver said as they started away, slapping his hand twice on the side of the truck.

They watched as the trucks lumbered off beyond the hills, and Morita and Jones finished changing out the jeep wheel. 

Falsworth and Dernier were engaged in some kind of intense conversation in French, Steve could only make out one or two words here and there, but it sounded as if they were debating the best route to take to this fantasy Hydra factory. They hadn’t discussed a plan at all; each of them seemed to assume that because the script had called for them to save Dr. Reinstein, that was what they should do now. As if it was all just a foregone conclusion that if Reinstein, or rather, Erskine was real, this was their mission. It had been a long time since Steve had felt this kind of warmth for anyone but Bucky and his ma. These were such good guys at heart, really. If he had to live inside a nightmare, at least he was with people he could call friends.

Dum Dum jumped behind the wheel when the jeep was ready. “Saddle up, fellas. Captain America and his Howling Commandos are off to save the day.”

 

~~~~

 

“Hey, listen,” Morita remarked at the sounds far off in the distance. “That’s us, right? One-oh-fives.” 

“Nah, it’s theirs, eight-eights,” Gabe responded. In the darkness they could see the red arcs of artillery explode across the sky. “Some poor guys are getting a shellacking tonight.”

“Christ, I hope it’s not the rest of the 107th or this SSR unit. Sounds like they suffered enough,” Dugan said.

“Too far east,” Dernier said, his brow furrowed as he looked through Jim’s scope. _“Ces pauvres diables.”_ They drove a few more miles until they spied a thin line of yellow light at the horizon, and Dugan cut the headlights on the jeep. The dirt track was muddy and pitted, a sure sign of heavy truck and tank traffic, yet they hadn’t encountered any Germans yet.

Suddenly Dugan hit the brakes hard and they jolted sideways. “Jesus, Dugan, knock it off!” Gabe said harshly.

Dugan stuck a cigar in his mouth. Where the hell had he been hiding that? “I beg your pardon, sir.” He pointed straight ahead. “But I believe we have arrived at Chez Crimson Skull. Tickets, please.” Dugan motored them into tree cover as they all stared rather hopelessly at their objective.

It was a forbidding, prisonlike place, with high walls of concrete ringed by a tall barbed-wire fence. The area in front was full of trucks and tanks and all manner of armored vehicles; dozens of men swarmed around like ants, and they wore strange uniforms and black, faceless helmets. Searchlights scanned the area, and as Steve and the men sat within cover of the trees, a few trucks drove into the grounds. For some time they watched silently as the trucks were unloaded, getting a feel for the place.

Morita tossed Steve a box of supper rations and a few bars. Steve had such a case of the jitters that he was sick to his stomach again, couldn’t imagine eating despite how hungry he’d been earlier, but he badly needed the calories. He stared at the tin of meat and the biscuits; his mouth already felt like sawdust and chewing them was almost impossible. Of course they had no hot water for the beverage or buillon powders. Maybe he could just suck on the sugar cubes, that would at least give him some energy. 

No one else enjoyed theirs, either--Gardner’s face contorted with actorly attempts at pretending he was satisfied with the rations; it was such a long way from his life as a pampered movie star. Steve smiled at him, relaxing a little, unwrapping the biscuits and stuffing them in his dry mouth. Gabe had refilled all the canteens and a two-gallon jug of water before they left; he passed one to Steve so he could wash the biscuits down. The purification tablets made the water taste horrible, but this was soldiering--you endured, you made the best of what you got. He’d asked for it. Steve touched the flask still in his chest pocket; he might take a nip when no one was watching for some Dutch courage. 

They waited a few more hours when Dugan gave them the sign and they hopped out of the jeep. He slapped Steve on the back and said, “Okay, Rogers, what’s the plan?” Steve snapped out a laugh before realizing with icy horror that Dugan was totally serious. Gardner frowned.

“Why are you asking me?” Steve said.

“Because you know what you’re doing, and we’re short one sergeant and one CO. No offense,” he said, grinning at Captain America. 

Gardner sighed. “None taken, I’m sure.”

“But you’re seasoned combat veterans. I’m just...the lippy kid, remember?”

“Maybe, but you weren’t wrong before. That was some outstanding tactical shit back on the soundstage. Make a good leader.”

Morita added, “Planning ain’t anybody here’s strong suit. We’re just the grunts. C’mon, slim, pony up.” 

Steve stood there with his mouth hanging open and his heart beating a double-time cadence in his chest. They really thought he was a good leader? A tactician? Bucky would have laughed his fool head off. Steve couldn’t even lead a pack of kittens. Reading books was one thing; commanding men in the field was entirely different.

“Go on,” Gabe said and shoved him with his shoulder. “You can do this. Tell us how we find the doc and rescue our boys.”

Assuming Bucky was alive seemed pretty foolish, but the hope was all Steve had to cling to. He scanned the area with Morita’s scope. “All right, then.” He looked at them all, waiting expectantly, even Cap, cleared his throat, and stood a little taller. “Listen up.”

### 3\. The days of miracle and wonder

Steve stood behind a bomb casing and scanned the area. Hard to buy that they were all safely inside the factory--it probably wasn’t the best idea to openly admit that you hadn’t believed your plan would actually work to the very men who were following your plan. But inside the factory they were, and now they had to find Dr. Erskine and see if Bucky and the rest of the prisoners were still alive. The odds were terrible.

All three American soldiers had had some Ranger training, including a few pretty nifty judo moves: choke holds, throat strikes, chops with the hand. Steve had grown up throwing punches and kicking and wrestling in the dirt, so it hadn’t come naturally to him to use a throat chop instead of a haymaker, but he picked it up pretty fast. And Falsworth! Steve knew the British paratroopers were highly trained and that they’d used stealthy, raiding-style tactics in their early operations, but he hadn’t expected such brutal efficiency from the guy who’d said jovially, before they breached the fence, “Call me Monty, all the lads do. I think it’s a bit of taking the piss, but I rather like it.” 

The Germans were building bombs here. Very, very large bombs. And they were clearly using the Allied prisoners to build them; Steve saw American, British, Australian uniforms, men in street clothes who were probably French, like Dernier. The assembled bomb parts and other weapons emitted a blue light, just as Baum had described. As they passed a table, Steve grabbed a small gizmo in case that doctor fellow would know what to do with it, stuffing it in his pocket next to Bucky’s flask. 

It seemed most likely that the prisoners would be kept somewhere close to the factory floor. After watching a few minutes, Steve saw a few guards moving prisoners toward a door at the far end of the factory floor, so he gestured for the Commandos and they crept forward through the crates and machines, quietly picking off black-clad soldiers as they went. Steve wondered if Bucky could be proud of him for this, for being part of a team and performing capably. More likely he’d be furious at Steve for putting himself in harm’s way. It wouldn’t matter, just as long as Bucky was still alive to have any reaction at all. After his mother died, he’d often thought: I’d pay anything, do anything, to have her lecture me again. There was nothing Bucky could do to Steve he wouldn’t be glad of, as long as he was here to do it. 

They were out of the main assembly area and down a dark corridor, in a part of the building that seemed as if had been built a long time ago--red bricks, old seeded-glass windows, lots of wood; nothing like that gleaming steel and concrete wing they’d just left. Searchlights spilled in, casting everything in an otherworldly glow, and for some reason it made Steve shiver. 

Most of the doors were open, but there was little in the rooms they could see other than equipment, machinery, desks. When they came to a closed and locked door, Steve signaled Gabe to give him a boost up to the small transom. Standing on Gabe’s shoulders, he peered inside, where he saw one armed guard immediately behind the door--though he couldn’t see much to the left or right, so if there were other guards just inside the door, they were screwed. At the opposite end of the room sat a man, his head lolling forward, arms bound behind him. Bingo. 

If he could squeeze into the open transom, he might be able to drop down on top of the guard and knock him out. Or just get himself killed in the process, one of the two, neither especially appealing. But he had to try. Steve shimmied through, then fell right on top of the guy like a sack of potatoes, knocking him to the ground. He’d noticed coming in that there seemed to be a couple different types of personnel here--regular soldiers, storm-trooper types, wearing full-face helmets that made them look sinister and imposing, and plain guards, who wore helmets that left the lower half of the face and top of the neck uncovered. That style gave Steve a perfect opportunity for a throat strike, just like Morita had shown him. Steve quickly unlocked the door as the guard scrambled after him, violently trying to breathe, and as soon as they rushed inside, Morita and Gabe made short work of the guard. The first time Steve had hit someone hard enough to kill--watching in horror at the way the soldier had grabbed his throat, huge sucking sounds coming from his gasping mouth--he’d been overcome with grim remorse, but the boys were right: it quickly got horribly, terribly easier to kill and to watch someone die. You had to think of it abstractly, accept that it was the job of a soldier. Steve reminded himself: these were the people who had taken Bucky, these were the men who would kill them if they weren’t killed first. 

He turned his attention, instead, to the doctor. “Dr. Rei--Erskine?” Steve asked, and knelt in front of him. The man had looked up when he’d heard the scuffle, and was watching them with an arched eyebrow. He wore a faint smile, as if this was a show put on for his amusement, and for some reason, Steve took an instant liking to him. 

“Yes, I am Abraham Erskine.” His head snapped back when he saw Gardner in his Captain America outfit. “Ah. You must be my fictional counterpart’s supersoldier.”

Steve grinned and untied his wrists. “My name’s Steve Rogers. We’re here to rescue you.”

“How very flattering. And also that they’ve sent Captain America after me. I believe you are the Howling Commandos of comic book fame?” He looked Steve over. “Although you I am not familiar with.”

“It’s kind of a long story. And pretty unbelievable. But we’d like to take you back to the--SSR, right?” He still wasn’t sure what the initials stood for, had forgotten to ask Baum. Steve still had no idea _how_ they were going to take him back, but he’d save that worry for when they were quit of this place.

“Yes,” Erskine said as they helped him stand. 

“I don’t really have any superpowers,” Gardner explained, “but these fellows are pretty gallant. If anyone can get you back to your unit, they can.” 

“That’s comforting to know.” His smile was so wry and his voice so droll that Steve almost laughed. 

Dugan asked, “Do you know the layout of this place? We came in by the factory floor, but for obvious reasons, it’d be a good idea not to go back that way.”

“Yes, I believe there’s another way. They haven’t allowed me much movement, as you can imagine.” He adjusted his glasses, took his handkerchief out of a pocket, and wiped some blood off his face. Poor fella--he must have been here for a long time, his clothes were a mess and he looked nearly stove-in. Steve dug one of the assault ration bars out of his pocket. Though time was of the essence, if there was one thing a lifetime of poor health had taught him, it was that you’d slow everyone down if you weren’t fit to move. 

Erskine looked at him with such kindness and gratitude that it made him blush. “Have they hurt you?” Steve asked.

He smiled and took a bite of the bar, then made a face of extreme distaste. “Not too much. Most of my time here has been spent with Herr Dr. Zola, and he is too much of a coward for that.”

“What did they want you for?” Gardner asked. That question coming from Gardner seemed to amuse Erskine quite a bit. 

Erskine responded, “Unfortunately, Johann Schmidt and I are old acquaintances. He forced me to give him an early version of my formula, you see, but it was not ready, and, well...it made a monster of him. Zola has tried to re-create it ever since, without success. The science is past them, I think. Meanwhile, Schmidt has found himself a terrible, terrible weapon, an energy source called the Tesseract. So he builds weapons and Zola experiments.” He smiled at Steve. “He hears that I am with the Strategic Science Reserve, and finds me when we arrive in London for the tests of my perfected formula. They take me here, try to force me to fix Zola’s version of the serum. The whole time I am here, I can’t help but wonder why, if you have such a powerful weapon at your disposal, you need an army of supersoldiers as well. It seems a bit”--his mouth twisted in a dry smile--“excessive, no?”

Steve grinned. Jim shouldered his rifle and said, “Well, let’s get you out of here, then, before they can do any excessive damage.”

Erskine chuckled and glanced at Cap. “This is very helpful--at least now I know what to call my test subject if we succeed.” Morita carefully opened the door to check down the corridor. 

They moved in diamond formation around Erskine, Steve on his nine o’clock. As they were creeping down the corridor, Steve asked quietly, “We were also looking for a friend of mine. He was captured with his outfit. Do you know where the prisoners are kept?”

It surprised Steve, how calm and curious Erskine was despite what was happening. But at Steve’s question he sighed heavily, abruptly sad, Steve thought, almost grieving. “There are cells running the length of this side of the building, and Zola has taken some prisoners to...experiment on,” he said. He looked at Steve tenderly. “But I am afraid that, because I have refused to help Zola, none of his experiments have been successful.” Steve’s face must have betrayed his despair, because Erskine reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

His eyes were hot and his throat hurt. He knew what Erskine meant. He knew there was only a snowball’s chance in hell that this movie he was in had a happy ending. But it was his job as a soldier to focus and get the doctor out of here, and then he could look for Bucky.

At the end of the corridor they found a metal stairwell which would leave them exposed, but they had no choice. They crept down it, and with relief reached the last door to the outside. Dugan jimmied the door open, and they stepped out into darkness. 

Too bad they rounded the corner straight into twelve guards with guns pointed at them, in front of a tall man with a horrific red head. “Aw, shit,” Dugan said, as the soldiers pushed forward. “I bet that ain’t in the script.”

 

~~~~

 

They were taken to a door marked _Zellen_. “Does that mean cells?” Steve asked, and Gabe said sadly, “Yeah.” Dugan seemed surprised. “What? Took a few semesters at Howard, switched to French eventually. Girls were much cuter.”

“Adds to the resume, I guess,” Dugan said, and shook his head. The guard barked at them to shut up and hit Gabe in the back with his rifle. Steve wished he could get a good look at those strange weapons, figure out how they worked. He was pretty good with mechanical things and he wanted to know how to use one, just in case they got out of this.

They were marched through the doors and into the cells, which were circular, with a barred top that the second-level guard could fire down through--easy to keep the prisoners in line, and Steve briefly saw red just thinking about it--while the cell door faced onto the concrete walkway that ran between them. If someone could get out, it would be easy to open all the cells with haste. Each one was crowded with G.I.s, in the hundreds, he was pretty sure. Jesus. 

When Schmidt--the Red Skull, they were calling him, Gabe had said, just plain old red--had found them, he’d given them a twisted grin and said, “Doctor Erskine, I think now you are much more trouble than you are worth.” It was the first time Steve had seen Erskine show signs of anxiety, not exactly a comfort in that moment. “It’s time for me to bring Doctor Zola’s pet projects to a halt. His obsession grows tiresome.” So it wasn’t Schmidt who wanted the super-army after all.

Steve’s mind whirled as Schmidt looked them all over, studying them like they were bugs he was excited to stomp on. What exactly had this SSR planned, if everything that was written in the scripts and comics was based on real life? There was something scrabbling at the back of his mind, something he thought he should know, but it wouldn’t come forward. 

“And Captain America!” Schmidt had said to Gardner. “How exciting. I am a great fan of your films. Though I fear my fictional counterpart does not do me justice. I have, after all, surpassed my human nature, while you...” He trailed off, glancing at Gardner’s belly. 

“You’re nuttier than a fruitcake,” Gardner said, and got a punch to the mouth for his trouble. 

“And your Howling Commandos. So colorful! Most entertaining.” Schmidt sighed, glaring at Erskine. “You are convinced you will win this war, believing yourself to have the best”--his glance settled on Steve, and he stumbled for a moment--“men. What you don’t realize is that it is already won, and all the supersoldiers in the world cannot help you now.”

Erskine had been very quiet, but he said, “Yet in the meantime, you require prisoners to help you build the weapons that will secure your victory. Perhaps we could join the rest of them until you have need of us.”

Schmidt--growled, Steve thought, that was an actual dog growl, motioning for the guards to take them away. “You could have had everything, Doctor, if you had stayed in Germany with me. I was your greatest triumph, the first wave of something more exalted than these pathetic creatures are capable of understanding. I’ve left humanity behind and I embrace it proudly.”

All Erskine did was raise his eyebrow. 

Now they were sitting in a cell and they were going to die before Steve could understand how he’d set all this in motion and fix it. He had to accept the terrible responsibility that he’d made this happen even if he didn’t know how.

The men in the cell next to theirs had been staring at them since they’d arrived, unable to make sense of what they were seeing. “Who’s the guy wearing his union suit out in public?” one had asked, and another had said, “Look at that fella--if he don’t think he’s the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan!” 

Steve asked one of the guys in the other cell, “Are any of you from the 107th? Do you know a Sergeant James Barnes?” They shook their heads. 

“Might try the fellas farther down thataway since they came in after we did.”

“How long you been here?” Morita asked. 

“Long enough, but I figure we ain’t got much more time. We’ve been dropping like flies, worked too much on the floor or we get sick from being packed in like sardines. They don’t feed us much. Fella gets sick here, boom!” he said, and pointed his finger at his head like a gun. Shit, what if Bucky had gotten sick? What if he’d been worked to death, or worse, experimented on like Erskine had said? Steve wrapped his arms around his middle and leaned forward, imagining Bucky next to him, breathing in one-two-three-four, out one-two-three-four. 

“Steven,” Erskine said softly, snapping Steve out of his funk. It was funny that he called him that--only his ma and Bucky’s ma ever called him Steven. “What is it?”

“This is all my fault.”

“That sounds as grandiose as Schmidt’s ravings.”

Steve huffed out a shaky laugh. “I suppose it does sound pretty self-important. But it really is. All my doing, I mean.” At Erskine’s wide-open eyes and quirked mouth, Steve let the entire story spill out. 

Erskine adjusted his glasses and thought for a while. Steve wasn’t sure what he’d expected--derisive laughter, scoffing, outright dismissal. Or hostility; he deserved hostility. “So, you wished yourself into a moving picture about a comic book hero in order to come to Europe and kill some Nazis.”

His eyebrows knitted together. “Are you asking me a question, or telling me something I already know?” 

“Did you want to kill Nazis?”

“Is this a test?” Steve asked, suspicious. What was Erskine driving at?

“Perhaps.”

Steve blinked. “No, I--I never really wanted to kill anyone.” And yet he had, so what did that make him? He looked down at his feet. “I just don’t like bullies, whoever they are.”

“Hm.” Erskine regarded him for a while. “It seems as if you have been brought here for a reason that is perhaps unseen at this point. You and the captain and the Howling Commandos, even if they began by playing a part in your story.”

“You mean like--God wants me here?” Steve asked, afraid he was going to laugh.

“Who knows? Not me, I don’t know. But I think that’s not the important part, yes?” He cleared his throat. Gabe and Dugan had turned around now and were listening to their conversation. “Maybe each of us has another role to play beyond that film script. And you know, there are already so many big men fighting this war. Maybe what we also needed was a little guy. Whatever has caused this to happen wanted one little guy in particular.”

It almost made sense to him. Almost. “What do you think I’m supposed to do?”

Erskine shrugged. “That, I would have no idea. But perhaps if we all put our heads together, we can write a new scene that won’t get us all killed.”

 

~~~~

 

“That one there, the radio,” Steve said, waving and pointing to the opposite corner of the room. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring Gardner along. Though, to be fair, Steve had almost missed it too, since it didn’t look like any radio transmitter he’d ever seen and everything was labeled in German.

“You know, events have been following the scripts pretty well. The third installment after this one had us radioing in to the tactical science unit. It was a basic Caesar cipher, I was going to give the coded location of the Skull’s fortress.” Gardner was smarter than Steve had given him credit for if he knew about ciphers.

Steve shrugged. “Worth a try. God knows it can’t get any weirder.” Gardner gave him a look that said _great, now you’ve jinxed us_.

They’d been cooling their heels in the cell, discussing plans, when Dugan had put his hands on his hips and grinned. “I ever tell you gentlemen my former career before the army swept me off my feet with an offer of an all-expenses paid honeymoon to Europe?” He’d flexed his arms and struck a few poses. “Circus strongman. Once lifted a plank with four girls sittin’ on it overhead. Hermann Görner got nothin’ on me.” Steve had no idea who that was, but he got the gist.

Steve had stood up. “My head’s too big for my body, the other kids used to tease me about it,” Steve said as everyone in the cell laughed. But he’d jerked his chin at the largest opening, the slot they must have slipped through what little food and water the prisoners received. “If you can widen that enough, the rest of me will fit, easy.”

“I love a challenge,” Dugan had responded stoutly, squatting halfway down, taking deep breaths, before he pulled on the bars. “Aw, this stuff’s flimsy. Must have just slapped these up faster’n you could say Betty Grable. Takes all the fun out of it.” For about five minutes he continued to bend the bars, taking small rest breaks, before there was an opening wide enough Steve could squirm through. Then had come the hard part.

“You really think you can do this?” Gabe had asked, and Steve nodded. He’d already killed men coming in here; if it meant rescuing his friends, finding Bucky alive, then he was ready to do what he had to. 

The prisoners were silent but smiling as they watched him sneak along the rows of cells, positioning themselves to provide him with cover from the guard on the second tier. He’d waited until he was in a perfect location to crouch and run forward along the guard’s blind spot at the left, and slipped a knife into his carotid artery, just where Monty had shown him. Steve caught the rifle as the guard dropped, grabbed his keys, and ran back to the cell.

Dugan slapped him on the back and Steve went flying forward. “What’d I tell you, gents? He’s a fireball.”

The plan had been for the Commandos and Dr. Erskine to get all the prisoners out and hightail it to the treeline while Steve and Captain America found a radio and called for support, because they were the least trained for a firefight. Erskine had given him the passphrases for the SSR’s radio operator and CO. As Steve was on his way out, one fellow grabbed his arm. “You the one looking for Sergeant Barnes?” he asked, a tall, red-haired guy with a southern accent. Steve nodded. “They took him to the isolation ward two days ago. Nobody’s ever come back from there, and we ain’t seen him since.” 

Everything had gone numb inside Steve, time had stretched out like taffy, the blood noisily whish-whish-whishing in his head. Two days. He might be dead by now. Steve told himself: even if all I find is his dead body, then that’s what I have to do. 

Now that he was in the control room, Steve was--well, he wouldn’t want to admit this to anyone at all, ever, but he was exhilarated underneath the fear. Not at seeing other men die or at killing them himself, but at being useful. Bucky had accused him of wanting to prove something by enlisting, and Steve could now admit to himself that yes, it was true, though it wasn’t what Bucky had believed he was trying to prove. He was capable of doing what a soldier had to do, and just because he didn’t look like much didn’t mean he wasn’t much. Steve had never been a lousy fighter, he was simply outmatched in weight and height most of the time; now he had a pistol and a rifle and some swell hand-to-hand moves, and he could use his size to advantage. He was--maybe not important, but valuable.

Strangely, Steve hadn’t had felt truly sick or weak once. Yes, it was entirely possible he could still have an asthma attack or he might get hurt, but this was what he had prepared for, studied for, since the day England declared war on Germany. He was finally a soldier.

They’d found a hell of a lot more than a radio in the control room overlooking the factory floor. Steve hadn’t thought about bringing Erskine along to translate and he didn’t know exactly what kind of intelligence he was looking at, but it all seemed very important and he wasn’t sure what to try to commit to memory or take with him. There was so much advanced technology here that the Allied scientists could keep busy for months taking it all apart--it looked like a Flash Gordon movie, in fact. Holy hell, Steve thought, that’s why this all seemed so familiar.

 _God, this movie I’m in is bad enough, please don’t let me end up in one of those._ His heart couldn’t withstand a trip to the future.

While Gardner attempted to get someone to listen to him on the other end of the short-wave, Steve tore through documents, looking for anything that might help him figure out where Bucky could be. Erskine had said the isolation ward and labs were on the other end of the factory floor, and Steve wasn’t certain exactly where they were now; he couldn’t afford to waste precious minutes. Locating this control room had been easy enough, but-- 

“The 107th!” Gardner practically shouted. “We were with the 107th and we have Dr. Erskine now. We need support and a rendezvous point, we’ve got wounded and prisoners. Over.”

Whoever was on the other end really, really didn’t believe him, even with the code words. Gardner repeated the codes, slowly and through gritted teeth--clearly Captain America’s actor was not used to people continually ignoring him and he’d reached his breaking point--then there was a long pause before another voice came on the line, demanding to know just who the hell they thought they were.

God, this was wasting so much time, the prisoners had to be out in the perimeter by now. Steve was just about to grab the receiver out of Cap’s hand when all hell broke loose. Klaxons blared, lights flashed, and chaos erupted down on the factory floor, an anthill teeming beneath a crushing boot. “Shit!” Steve shouted, grabbed the back of Cap’s cowl to haul him out of there, and turned to run smack dab into a nasty right hook. He sailed backwards into Gardner and they both went down on the floor. After shaking his head and rubbing his jaw, Steve looked up into the most beautiful pair of brown eyes he’d ever seen--immediately behind the barrel of a Walther PPK. 

“Who the bloody hell are you?” the woman holding it said, frowning and glancing back and forth between Cap and Steve. She glared out at the factory floor. “You’ve bollocksed my entire operation.”

She was dressed as a--well, charwoman, Steve thought, and then realized he’d seen a few people who did look like civilians when they’d snuck into the factory. He supposed it made sense, there were soldiers and prisoners here, someone had to feed them and clean up and see to the day-to-day stuff. Despite the English accent, she could be some kind of Mata Hari, but he didn’t have the time to be suspicious.

“My--my name’s Steve Rogers. This is--”

“Captain bloody America, yes, I know. Though what either of you are doing here cocking this up, I’ve no idea.” She was gorgeous, with a keen intelligence at work behind those huge, beautiful eyes. Her brown hair was tucked up under a kerchief, and she had a nice shape under the dreary cleaning clothes. 

“We--we were with the 107th, we came to rescue Dr. Erskine and return him to the SSR. It’s kind of a long story. You probably wouldn’t believe it if we told you. But--but we also let the Allied soldiers out. That’s why the,” he said, pointing at the ceiling’s flashing light. She sighed heavily.

“Who were you communicating with when I came in?” she asked, and jerked her head toward the radio. It didn’t escape his notice that she wasn’t taking the gun off cock.

“The SSR. Or, well, I assume it was them, I asked to talk to Colonel Phillips, Erskine told me the passphrases, but they--” Gardner seemed as nonplussed as Steve was.

“We’ve got to move, now. This is the first place Schmidt and Zola will come. Everything’s compromised.” She muttered darkly, something Steve couldn’t hear, as she slipped the gun in the pocket of her sweater and helped him up. They followed her down the corridor, Steve’s heart hammering in his chest--she could be leading them straight to Hydra soldiers. A glance at Gardner told Steve that was his line of thought, too. The woman pulled them into an alcove and held a finger up. She was so confident, seemed so clever. 

She reached up to her chest and--Jesus, into her brassiere, down between her breasts, bringing up the tiniest, most Buck Rogers-type crystal set Steve had ever seen. It couldn’t have been bigger than her palm. He gawped and she shrugged, then took one of the thin wires and put it to her ear; the other, attached to a small microphone, she put to her crimson lips. For the first few seconds he didn’t even hear what she was saying, he was too busy marveling at the whole thing. They were coded phrases that she spoke, but the grumpy old man voice he’d heard arguing with Gardner was responding to her in uncoded words, he could hear that even from where he stood. “How the _hell_ did some yahoo calling himself Captain America know our codes? Know about the scientific asset?”

“I’ve no idea. But we’ll need transport if we get out of here, if they’re to be believed. We need a rendezvous point.”

They spent the next few seconds wrangling what that entailed, and then she motioned for them to get going. They were lucky, then, to have encountered her, because Steve wasn’t sure that he and Cap would have been able to reach their comrades. She led them down a staircase to the ground floor and they were almost around the corner when the fellas suddenly appeared, surrounding Dr. Erskine. 

“I thought I told you guys to go if we didn’t make it out,” Steve snapped. The woman had her gun out again, facing off with the Commandos, and Steve wasn’t sure who he’d put money on to win it even if she was outgunned.

“Agent Carter,” Erskine said, amused. Her eyes flicked to him and then she sighed with relief.

“When you didn’t show, we came back,” Gabe said. “There’s fighting outside, parts of the building are blowing up. We weren’t sure you could make it.” Steve couldn’t help grinning at that--they’d come back for him. They were worried about _him_.

“This is one of ours, she’s helping us,” Steve said, and the agent rolled her eyes. “Look, you all go. I have to find Bucky. I’m sorry, but I have to. I think that’s why I’m here. I think that’s what I’m supposed to do.” They glanced at each other, and Agent Carter squinted at him. 

“If you’re staying, we’re staying.” Dugan looked Miss Carter up and down, completely inappropriately, Steve thought, and he scowled. “Tell you what, toots, you seem like you’re pretty handy with that thing. Why don’t you help the doc out of here?” 

She practically sneered at Dugan. “That was entirely what I was prepared to do until you idiots cocked everything up.” She took Erskine’s sleeve and hauled him along. “There’s a forest eighty yards past the gate. I’ll meet you there with any more prisoners you find.” She turned her sharp gaze on Steve and smiled, and his heart leapt. “Give ’em hell.”

An explosion rocked the lighting gantry above the factory floor. It would likely set off a chain reaction if there was another one, so there wouldn’t be much time left to find Bucky. “Geez, a guy could get killed around here,” Morita muttered, and Falsworth poked his shoulder, laughing. 

“Come on, Rogers, let’s find your chum,” Monty said. For a second, Steve didn’t actually comprehend that they were staying with him, helping him. He turned in the direction of the ward.

As they ran down the corridor, a small man came stumbling out of a room, coat and rolled up papers under his arm, a briefcase in the other hand. He had a pale, piggy face, round spectacles, and Steve could just see the cold, beady little eyes behind them, staring with fear and malice. He knew immediately that it was Zola, somehow. The monster inside Schmidt had been unleashed by the serum, Steve had seen the results himself, but his evil had seemed almost--expected, in that comic-book villain way. Zola, Steve thought, was so much worse, even at this distance, radiating the kind of malevolence and casual cruelty that came from not seeing others as human at all, and it made him shudder with loathing. Zola broke into a run.

Jim and Gabe started after him, but Steve stopped them. “He’s not worth it,” Steve said, dodging into the room. It was filled with creepy machinery, shelves and drawers full of carefully labeled things, and around the corner Steve heard Bucky’s voice. He was strapped to a table surrounded by strange, sinister machines, mumbling his name, rank, and service number, completely out of his head, when Steve reached him. “Oh, my God, Bucky.” He touched the side of Bucky’s face, and gradually he looked in Steve’s direction, not really seeing him.

“Bucky, it’s me. It’s Steve,” he said gently as the fellas undid the restraints. It made Steve want to vomit, to weep, to scream. What had they done to him? Blood ran from his ear, there were marks all over his face and neck and chest. His sweater was torn, everything was filthy, and he stank, had probably pissed himself long ago. Jesus, what if he had internal injuries or broken bones and couldn’t walk?

“Steve...is that... _Steve_ ,” Bucky said, smiling up at him, and oh God, he was going to cry in front of everyone, it ripped him to pieces. They hauled Bucky off the table, but he could barely stand under his own power.

Steve had concocted numerous highly imaginative scenarios for how he would reunite with Bucky once he finally made it into the army. There was: Bucky’s in a firefight, pinned down by German artillery, when Steve’s unit swoops in to save them, and Steve drops down next to him in the foxhole to ask nonchalantly, “What have you gotten yourself into this time, Barnes?”

or

Steve slides in next to Bucky in the mess, where he’s regaling his buddies with stories over chow, and says, “Is this seat taken?”

or

Steve, in a jeep or a truck, rolls up to Bucky with an armored unit just like those guys they ran into, and leans out the window to ask breezily, “Going my way?”

It was never: Steve’s leading a ragtag squad of international war-hero rejects, wearing a dead man’s jacket and helmet, accompanied by a paunchy actor in a Captain America costume with droopy tights and a goofy mask, and together they’re rescuing Bucky from the stronghold of a comic-book villain come to life.

“God, I thought you might be dead,” Steve said and touched his face.

Bucky stared at him with glazed eyes, mouth hanging open. “I thought you were 4F.” He blinked a few times. “This ain’t real, is it. Oh Christ, I’m dead. Or I’m dying. Aw, shit.”

“No, Buck, it’s me. It’s really me.” He glanced helplessly at Falsworth and Dugan, who put their arms under Bucky’s to help him stand. 

Steve couldn’t stop staring at Bucky, he knew the guys must think he really had finally lost his mind, but he couldn’t stop staring. Despite the marks of torture and being half out of his head Bucky was so handsome, so brilliant he shone like silver in moonlight. Steve wanted to tell Bucky how much he meant to him, that he’d never thought it possible he could love someone this much. Tell him that he didn’t need or expect Bucky to reciprocate, only to be his friend, to _always_ be his friend, allow Steve to listen to his voice or simply look at him, so beautiful and bright and true, the North Star gleaming in his sky.

But they had to go, they had to, and Steve must stop staring at him. With a shaky voice he said, “It’s a long story, Buck, but right now we gotta get outa here. This building’ll blow up pretty soon.” He touched the side of Bucky’s face quickly once more, unable to resist the urge. 

Bucky gave him a look that said _yeah, right_ , and Steve was gut-punched. The hundreds of times he’d seen that look on Bucky’s face, so many he’d lost count, and now Bucky was here, tortured and broken and Steve could do nothing for it. The desire to pull Bucky down to the floor and wrap his arms around him overcame him and he hesitated, until Falsworth and Dugan gestured at him to follow.

As they raced through the building, Bucky asked, “What happened to you? How did you get here?”

“Well, I joined the army. Sort of.”

“I can’t leave you alone for five fucking minutes, can I? I shoulda got a leash for you a long time ago.”

“It ain’t like you think.” They spilled outside into chaos, prisoners fighting Hydra goons amidst the tanks and half-tracks and other armored vehicles Steve had noticed before. A cluster of Hydra soldiers rushed at them all at once, but just as Steve saw the Commandos go for their weapons, a blast from one of the eerie blue tank guns hit the Hydra men and the wall to their left, the men vanishing in a ball of blue light and the wall crashing down. A brown-haired head poked around the gun housing: Agent Carter smiled. 

“If you’re coming, you’d best get a move on,” she said, pointing at the truck to her left. They made a run for it as she held off more Hydra agents with a crazy-looking rifle. Gabe, Dugan, and Falsworth went for the second tank, though, and she frowned at them as they clambered aboard. “Faster, ladies, faster. We’re in a hurry, you know. My grandmother has more life in her, God rest her soul.” 

A blast from one of the half-tracks almost hit them as they climbed into the tank, and Dernier fired back at it, though it seemed to do little damage. It was powering up to fire again, so Steve pushed Bucky toward Jim and the truck and said, “I gotta try to take that out. You go!” 

Bucky shook his hand off. “No! Not without you!” He grabbed Steve’s rifle but before he could bring it up to fire, a blast from Peggy on the tank gun blew the half-track up. “Holy cow,” Bucky muttered, staring at the tank.

Jim hopped behind the wheel of the truck as Steve hauled on Bucky’s arm, but Bucky stayed rooted to the ground, blinking. 

“Who’s the dish?” he asked.

“She’s with us!” Steve said, and finally coerced Bucky into the back of the truck. He tossed another rifle up to Bucky as he hauled him in. 

“I’m not gonna believe a word of this story, am I?” Bucky asked in his familiar aggrieved tone. 

“Probably not,” Steve said, and slapped the back of the cab so Morita would hit the gas. “But it’s a really _good_ story. Better than anything we’d catch at the Paramount.”

It took a while, but eventually they were out of the grounds and all living Allied prisoners accounted for. They had lost men, probably dozens, but that would have to be dealt with later. There wasn’t enough gas to keep all the tanks and half-tracks going for more than about five miles--for all that the weapons seemed to be powered by that blue energy, the vehicles still ran on gasoline--so they stopped to consolidate the wounded into a few trucks, siphoned gas where they could for the trucks and a few small armored vehicles, and headed off on the march back to Agent Carter’s SSR colleagues at the rendezvous point.

Steve balked at sitting in the truck, but Agent Carter insisted. She wanted to interrogate him and Gardner; Steve bristled even as he understood. She’d had a job to do, one that hadn’t included a bunch of strangers and two guys with no combat experience showing up and ruining everything. They were isolated and alone behind enemy lines with scores of wounded and ill men, and she had some responsibility for them. Gardner was--surprising, really, living up to his role by tending to other wounded men in the truck along with Dr. Erskine, telling them stories about Hollywood stars, and just generally being a nice fella.

As they rode further along, Steve convinced Bucky to lie down. He’d put his fatigue jacket over Bucky’s shoulders and Bucky rested his head on Steve’s lap, probably not sleeping but at least in a horizontal position with his eyes closed. Agent Carter sat across from them, watching, studying. It might be blatantly obvious to her exactly how he felt about Bucky; Steve wondered if she also noticed the way he was looking at her--he thought his heart must be pounding out of his chest like some cartoon character. 

“Is he badly injured?” she asked quietly. Steve shot a look at Dr. Erskine, who gave Steve a half smile, kind and fatherly. 

“It’s hard to say,” Steve said, low, and smoothed Bucky’s hair down. “He’s not--this isn’t how he usually is. Was.” He kept petting Bucky’s hair, unconcerned with whatever she might think of him. If she’d been in the field with soldiers, she’d probably seen much more than this. “He’s been gone for a while, fighting.” And he’d never tell Steve how badly he hurt, that much had always been true.

She gave him such a soft, sweet look that Steve almost swooned. Great, now he was hopelessly in love with two people who were completely out of his reach. “I realize we haven’t been properly introduced. Agent Peggy Carter, Strategic Science Reserve division.”

“Steve Rogers, no division. Not even a private. Not even in the army, technically.” They reached across to shake hands and she held on just a beat longer than was necessary. Shit, he was really a goner. 

“Yes, I heard you say you were 4F. That must have been difficult, wanting to join up and being told no so many times. I suppose I know a little of what that’s like. Having the door shut in your face repeatedly.”

He twisted his mouth in a little grimace of acknowledgement. “I can’t figure out why you’d want to be in the army if you were a beautiful dame--or a--a beautif--a woman--an _agent_ , not a dame. You _are_ beautiful, but--” _Stop talking, Steve, for the love of Christ, stop talking._

Fortunately, she laughed. “You have no idea how to talk to a woman, do you?”

Steve shrugged, gently so as not to disturb Bucky--he must really have fallen asleep, because he’d have snorted when she said that. “I think this is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with one. Women aren’t exactly lining up to dance with a guy they might step on.”

She frowned, and the way her eyebrows drew together made his heart clutch. “You must have danced.”

Steve looked down at Bucky, remembered all the times Bucky’d tried to teach him, how adamantly he’d insisted that someday, some smart gal was going to see Steve for who he really was and fall in love with him. Steve wrinkled his nose. “Asking a woman to dance always seemed so terrifying. Past few years, it just didn’t seem to matter that much. Figured I’d wait.”

“For what?” she asked softly.

“The right partner.” He looked up.

Peggy smiled at him in a way that made him feel transparent, opened like a book to a page where she could read all of his secrets. She glanced at her watch, then over at Dr. Erskine, who had shut his eyes, taking some well-deserved rest. “Well, it appears we have some time,” she said, and he loved how mobile and expressive her face was when she talked, widening her eyes or bouncing her eyebrows up and down, twisting her full, curved lips. “Perhaps now you can tell me this terribly fabulistic tale of how you came to be here.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

“He is the obvious choice,” Erskine was saying, clearly getting exasperated. Steve had been eavesdropping on him and Colonel Phillips from Erskine’s office for the past half hour, and even though they were separated by glass, he could hear everything. 

“When I let you drag a ninety-pound asthmatic stray you found in northern Italy back here, I thought you meant he’d be a little useful to your experiment, like a gerbil. We’ve got plenty of combat-trained, physically fit men for the procedure. If it wasn’t for you and Agent Carter, I’d have bounced his skinny ass all the way back to Brooklyn. I don’t care how he got here!” Colonel Phillips had turned out to be every bit the grumpy old man Steve had thought he sounded when they’d heard him on the radio. “Hell, shave a few pounds off that actor, and he’d be a better candidate. At least he’s got the costume already.”

Erskine sighed. “You know I am looking for characteristics beyond the physical.”

“Do you have any idea the amount of groveling I had to do for this program? Creating all these cover stories for it, setting up this lab of yours in a city that’s being bombed to kingdom come?” Phillips glared in Steve’s general direction. “You stick a needle in that kid’s arm, it’ll go right through him. Just looking at him makes me cry.”

This time Erskine smiled, the cat that ate the canary. “It’s what’s inside that matters, you know that. Colonel. I have seen him in action first-hand. I know what he’s capable of. I can change the outside, this we know. He has what I need in here.” Erskine tapped his chest.

“What about all these idiots we’ve spent the last year training? Like Hodge. He’s passed all the tests. He’s a perfect soldier.”

“He’s a bully.” Steve had seen Hodge when they’d marched into camp, a face that was all too familiar. He’d looked at Steve, walking at the head of the column, in a way that said: I will make it my personal mission to destroy you. 

The colonel and the doctor glared at each other for a little while, until Phillips waved his hand and shook his head, conceding defeat. “Jumping into a movie. Movie becomes real. How do these things happen to me? I’ll be cleaning the goddamn latrines when this thing goes south,” he muttered as he walked away. Erskine smiled at Steve. 

Steve and Bucky spent the early evening at the local pub with Peggy and the Commandos and Gardner, talking about what could be the final chapter of this serial if Steve went along with it, but he’d been on edge since the meeting with Erskine, so they left after a while. Peggy gave him a quick squeeze on the arm, a sympathetic smile. 

Steve tried to take his mind off of the whole question by puttering around the quarters he and Bucky shared in the nearby hotel, dragging out the sketchbook he’d picked up. He was drawing Peggy’s face when Erskine knocked on their door. Bucky stayed silent when he entered, hovering around the room as if he were a specter, glaring into the carpet. 

Bucky’d been predictably furious once he’d recovered a little of himself and heard the whole story that led to the rescue. He couldn’t understand why Steve hadn’t _parked your little rump on the back of one of the armored unit’s trucks and got yourself to a command post and then home, toot sweet, you fucking idiot_.

“I couldn’t let anything happen to you,” Steve had insisted. “You could have been dead--and you might be able to live with that, but I couldn’t. I _couldn’t_.”

Bucky had smirked, and Steve rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

He’d caught the tiniest glimpse of the Bucky he’d known before peeking through, amused and fond despite his exasperation, and then he’d said, shaking his head, “Punk.” He’d sighed. “You always said that a movie wasn’t worth shit if it didn’t have a happy ending.” Steve had left it there, because he had no idea what else to do. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Steve asked Erskine when he settled himself, with a bottle of schnapps, on Bucky’s bed. “Why me?” 

“I suppose that is the only question that matters.” Erskine thought for a while, then told him the story of his research: what had happened with Schmidt and the early version of his formula, about his escape to America and convincing the War Department to make use of his work, developing the program with the SSR and finding candidates. Most important, why he’d chosen Steve. That he’d made such an impact on the doctor was a pleasing shock, much the same sensation as when the Commandos had stuck with him back at the factory. Erskine looked at him warmly. “You needn’t make your decision right now. You can think about it.”

“No, I don’t need to think about it. I want to do it. I want to stay here with my friends and fight with them.” It would be foolish to think he could stay if he didn’t. This brief period of health wouldn’t last, he’d be felled by an asthma attack or something else even more serious sooner rather than later. 

Bucky moved his head around on his shoulders, trying to tamp down the urge to lecture. It was impossible for Bucky to understand what it was like to be turned away when you had something to offer. Steve had always thought he was capable of being a good leader and now he’d proven that to everyone; even someone like Colonel Phillips could see it. He could be a good fighter if he had the right kind of body. 

Bucky had to stop protecting him someday. He had to learn to let go of Steve, the way Steve had been forced to let go of Bucky when he’d shipped off to Camp McCoy.

“This is from Augsberg. My city.” He held up the bottle and took the three glasses he’d brought, pouring the schnapps and handing them to Steve and Bucky. “To the little guy,” Erskine said with a twinkle in his eye, and Bucky laughed harshly but grudgingly toasted Steve all the same.

They would do the procedure the day after tomorrow, Erskine said, laying out the somewhat alarming details. It sounded terrifying and thrilling. As he left, Erskine patted Steve’s shoulder and squeezed Bucky’s arm, and when Bucky closed the door he turned to Steve, hands held out in helpless supplication. Steve only crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not gonna let you talk me out of this,” Steve said churlishly.

“Right, God forbid someone tries to talk a stubborn jackass like you out of or into something. When have you ever listened to anyone a day in your ornery life? You are a punk, you know that? A stupid goddamn punk.” The light glinted off the wetness quivering at the edges of his eyes, and Steve’s attempt at steely resolve evaporated.

“Shit, Buck, it’s not like I expected to get sucked into a movie and right into the middle of the war so I could rescue you from a crazy Nazi. I didn’t exactly get a warning that I’d be offered a chance to get shot up with some magical potion so I could become a real life version of Captain America and help win the war. None of this happened because I wanted to piss you off personally. What the hell do you want from me?” As angry as Steve was, when Bucky looked like this he became weak, soft-hearted. Now he wanted to be the one protecting Bucky, to have the strength to hold this broken, damaged husk of a person together. “Oh, hell,” Steve said, and threw himself forward onto the floor at Bucky’s feet, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s waist and pressing his cheek to Bucky’s sternum. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve only ever wanted what’s best for me. To keep me safe. I know I make it hard for you.”

He huffed a laugh. “You forgot to mention in that list somewhere that you also met a swell dame who finally sees you for who you are.”

“Stop it,” Steve said into Bucky’s shirt. “She doesn’t. It ain’t like that.”

“Steve,” Bucky whispered, burying his fingers in Steve’s hair and laying his cheek against the top of Steve’s head. “What if you die? What am I gonna do then?”

“I won’t. I’m too stubborn to die, you said it yourself.” He wished Bucky would keep touching him like this forever. 

Bucky was the only one besides his ma who’d ever looked at him and not seen a waste of life, a failure of birth. He had to say it. “Buck, you can’t imagine what it was like for me, as crazy and bizarre and terrifying as it was. What it felt like to have the guys listen to me, and tell me I had good ideas and be willing to follow me. They let me _lead_ them. Yes, I wanted to prove something by serving, it’s true. And I don’t know, maybe I’m making all this up in my head, because this is everything I ever wanted--to show everyone that I could do more than they thought I could. That I was the person you and Ma believed I was.”

“I saw you, sometimes,” Bucky said quietly. Not looking at Steve’s face might have been the only thing giving him the courage to talk about being on that table. He hadn’t said a word about it on the march back to camp, on the trip back to England, or since they’d been here. “I’d be out of my head and burning up inside, wishing I could tear my own skin off, but then I’d think I saw you. It helped me...endure. Kept imagining you giving me shit for lying down on the job. Telling me that if you could survive all the shit that happened to you, I was just malingering if I didn’t, too.” A brittle laugh, and then he was silent, still running his fingers through Steve’s hair.

Steve had thought he’d heard Bucky’s voice when he was in that theatre a couple days ago. As if Bucky was calling out to him. He shivered and Bucky stopped touching him, pulling away, startled in his melancholy. “We know there are really monsters in the world now,” Steve said, daring to reach out to Bucky’s face--like touching starlight, he thought. “They don’t hide in a closet or under the bed. They’re _here_ , they want to destroy us, and if this works, I can fight them. I can stop them. I think I was meant to do this. I can make sure nothing like that ever happens to you again.”

Bucky’s eyes were mournful, matching his achy, soft voice as he said, “And then you won’t be you anymore.” 

Peggy had said she admired him for his willingness to be a test subject; Bucky hated him for it. But the decision was made, and Steve wasn’t turning back. 

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

There was pain: so much more than he’d ever endured in a lifetime of chronic pain. The paddles that delivered serum pierced acres of his skin and the shock punched his breath away. Steve’s lungs and throat seized shut as liquid fire poured through his veins, a river of acid running through his body, straight into his heart, his brain. He made a joke of it--for himself, or for them?--when they closed the machine that looked like a coffin. Vita-Rays turned up, and up, and up, sunlight blazed through the thin skin of his eyelids, searing his retinas, he was blind with it, he might never see again. He was a chop on a grill, sizzling and charring; he was a piece of vellum dipped into a candle flame, orange and blue fire curling the skin as it blackened into ash. His scream was so loud it drowned out everything else till he heard Erskine shouting “Steven!” and Peggy shouting “shut it down!” No, he could do this, he knew he could, even if he would come out of the coffin a blackened lump. He remembered stories about ancient tortures: iron maidens, the brass bull, the lead sprinkler. The rack, too. Muscles torn and twisted, skin stretched to the snapping point, bones that would shatter like spun glass dropped onto a tile floor. 

There was fear: in a way that he’d never really known before, that clawed at his mind and sent a deep black shudder through him. At the Expo he’d seen Howard Stark’s car blow up; now he was in a machine Stark had built and if that wasn’t a basis for terror, he didn’t know what was. What if it was worse than death, what if he didn’t die, only ended up a hunk of twisted and gnarled and melted flesh? He remembered his mother telling him about the boys who’d come home from the war with their faces blown off, feeding them through tubes with slurries of mush, or breathing through holes in their melted throats. Maybe Peggy and Bucky and Erskine would walk away in disgust, walk away from something that wasn’t alive but wasn’t dead enough for them to mourn. Had he committed a mortal sin, if he did die? He’d knowingly chosen a path that might kill him, wanted it. If this didn’t work, it would be Steve’s failure; they knew the serum worked on Schmidt so if it didn’t on him, it was his weakness, his sickliness, his uselessness. Or what if he turned out exactly like Schmidt? Steve wasn’t the good man they believed him, a dark current of anger flowed through him, always, forever. He heard the terrified lowing of an animal and realized it was him. 

And when it was over: relief, maybe even joy? He’d made it through alive, he could breathe like he’d never done before, his lungs huge, opening to full capacity. He was wrung out but invigorated, no longer the constant, underlying exhaustion that pulled at his limbs and diminished his mind. He could _breathe_ , God, it was amazing to feel so much air in his lungs. He wasn’t cold, he wasn’t weak; the only aches left those of quickly healing bones and muscles, disappearing even as he noticed. 

Steve was dimly aware of Stark and Dr. Erskine guiding him out of the machine, thinking: a machine to make a machine, because that’s what he was now, finely tuned, a weapon. Human, but not. Peggy asked him how he felt and all he could think to say was “taller.” She touched his chest, hot and electric, and agreed. “You look taller.” Someone handed him an undershirt to put on. They each came into focus: Howard and Erskine and Peggy, the Commandos and Grant Gardner, the people in the lab coats who’d helped make him into...he had yet to see what he was. Colonel Phillips and the senator who ran the program, he saw them all, bright under the gleam of the program’s success--and Bucky, who stood at the back of the crowd, hands at his sides instead of in front of him clapping along with the rest. The blood pounded in Steve’s ears. Bucky offered him a thin smile and turned away, moving with slumped shoulders through the crowd to the back door. Steve couldn’t go to him even if he wanted to--and wasn’t sure he did, when nothing had ever felt like this in his life: to be the first, to be the best, to be the one everyone was proud of. Deep down Bucky must be proud of him, Steve needed to believe that.

Steve was still Steve inside, that would never change, no matter what body he was in. 

“Well, Steven, you’ve seen how excited they are,” Dr. Erskine said quietly, and gave him that sweetly wry smile. “Tell me what you think.” They needed to know, of course they did: were they looking at another Johann Schmidt? 

On his left, Dugan pulled out a cigar and stuffed it in Gardner’s mouth, saying, “Guess you got some competition now for who’s gonna play Captain America.”

Steve smiled at that, and at the doctor, and said, “Score one for the little guy, Doctor.” He thought, not for the first time, that Erskine was the closest thing he’d had to a father, despite only knowing each other for a few days. Familiar, like something meant to be. Like home.

One of the men who’d arrived with Senator Brandt, standing on the periphery, caught Erskine’s attention and he turned away, then suddenly reached for Steve’s arm. Steve grabbed at him just as the windows of the observation area above them exploded. Erskine shouted, “Stop him!” as the man snatched serum tubes before firing in Steve and Erskine’s direction.

Gardner, who was in street clothes but had brought that silly shield with him, leapt in front of Steve, attempting to block the shot with the shield. It hit him instead in the shoulder and spun him around. Two more bullets fired, hitting Erskine square in the chest, and Steve watched in helpless horror as both Gardner and Erskine crumpled to the floor. None of the Commandos were armed, only the MPs--but the ones who hadn’t been caught in the explosion were slow to react. Peggy, however, was not. As Jim, Dum Dum, and Gabe bent over Gardner, Steve dropped to Erskine’s side, only vaguely aware that Peggy was firing at the man as he made his way out of the installation, Monty hot on her heels.

Erskine seemed dazed, couldn’t speak, but looked at Steve with that same fatherly affection and pride Steve saw before. He tapped his finger against Steve’s chest above the heart, three times, and then closed his eyes. 

Steve met Dum Dum’s eyes--it was clear he wasn’t sure if Gardner would be all right. Steve might still feel as weak and small and useless as he had before the procedure, he was yet untested. But there was rage, and that he was intimately familiar with.

He touched the side of Erskine’s face and pushed up from the floor on his powerful new legs, grabbed Gardner’s shield, and took the stairs two at a time. Outside the lab building, Peggy stood in the street, aiming her pistol. A black cab was gunning straight for her, all Steve could think to do was knock her out of the way. She hollered, “I had him!” 

“Sorry!” he blurted. Once he’d helped her to her feet he took off after the cab. This body was not really his yet, his limbs uncertain where they were in space and not communicating with the brain that tried to control them. He could run--unbelievably fast, and each time he thought he’d reached his maximum, he asked for more and his body delivered. Great heaping gulps of air filled his lungs, and though he was barefoot, Steve hardly noticed the cold wet cobblestones beneath his soles or the drag of the shield. The cab gained speed ahead of him so Steve did too, then it turned a corner, but as he followed Steve tilted too far sideways, crashing through a shop window. Ladies’ dresses, or something like that, and all he could think was how funny Bucky would find this later on. Once he was done yelling.

Over fences, over cars--he leapt and ran and simply kept going, his body not even fatigued yet, no soreness or injury from the shop window. There it was, the cab weaving in and out of traffic and he leapt atop a car to fly onto the roof of the cab. It swerved as the driver tried to shoot Steve through the roof, then flipped, rolling toward the Embankment on the Thames. He landed upright, but the agent was already on his feet, making his way to the shocked onlookers as he shot at Steve. The shield may have been nothing more than a trash can lid, but it did the trick, so the agent grabbed a little kid from the crowd in his frustration and pointed the gun to her head.

He had to have used his last bullet, Steve thought, counting back in his head. He wouldn’t have had time to reload, so Steve pushed forward, saying, “Don’t.” The man fired but when the hammer clicked dry, he threw the little girl in the river. She waved him off with a “go get him, I can swim!” The agent was headed further down the Embankment, Steve saw him dive into the water. 

He wasn’t certain what he was seeing. A--tiny submarine? Like something out of Jules Verne or Flash Gordon. But he was able to break the canopy and pull the man out, hurling him onto the bank. The vial of serum broke, blue and watery, seeping into the pavement. The agent bit down on a tooth and laughed, sneering as he said, “Hail Hydra.” God, it burned inside Steve and if the man hadn’t been dying, Steve would have killed him there: two good men were dead now because of Hydra’s obsession, and there was nothing they could do to repair this or to make more of him. Everything they’d done to save Erskine back in Austria had been for nothing. Steve stood up and stared at his empty hands; he would not be the first of a new breed, he was just himself, still just Steve Rogers.

At the sound of car tires screeching, he looked up to see Peggy arriving with the cavalry: a handful of MPs, plainclothes agents--spies, of course there were spies--and the Howling Commandos. The look on her face was impossible to read, he thought he saw affection, compassion, maybe a little bit of mocking disbelief, as if she wanted to say he’d thrown a spanner into the works again but was sparing him under the circumstances. She touched his arm instead, motioned for one of the MPs to bring a coat that she threw over his wet shoulders.

When Steve saw Dugan, their eyes met and Dugan shook his head. Steve stared at the shield at his feet. As often as he’d thought the past few days _this is real now_ , it still hadn’t sunk in, still felt like he was trapped in that ridiculous movie. How could this be the ending?

“Are you all right?” Peggy asked, and Steve nodded numbly.

“He--there was a, like a submarine thing, he was trying to escape, I pulled him out but the vial broke. It’s gone, the serum is gone.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” she insisted, and Steve watched as everyone began moving about. They all seemed to know what tasks to perform but he stood there, blank, lost. It was the scene of a crime, after all, one of espionage and war. “We’ll take your blood, perhaps we’ll find something. The information is locked in your genetic code now.”

“What will they do with me? I was supposed to be the test case, not the only one.” They might send him to Alamogordo, study him the way he’d heard Colonel Phillips joke to Dr. Erskine. 

“If his formula could work only once, Erskine would be glad it was you. It’s not your fault a Hydra agent gained access to the lab. You caught him before he could take that serum to Schmidt, that’s what’s important. Be proud of yourself.”

Steve scoffed. There was nothing about this disaster he could be proud of. 

“Come. Let’s get you back and into some dry clothes. There’s a great deal to talk about.”

They went, not to the lab but to the War Rooms, where Peggy had Bucky rounded up because she knew Steve would need him. Bucky stayed by his side as they debriefed Steve for several hours. Colonel Phillips congratulated Steve on preventing the last of the formula from ending up in Schmidt’s hands, but Steve was deaf to the praise, too miserable to do much of anything except allow Bucky to steer him from place to place. No one seemed to know what the next steps were; the program was in disarray, most of the formula had been in Erskine’s head.

Yet there’d be no time to figure out next steps or to honor Erskine and Grant Gardner; they were on their way to Washington as soon as possible for a high-level debriefing and something that Peggy warned him was “so ultra top secret that not even the senator knows about it.” That familiar fusing of terror and exhilaration swept through Steve--yet there was also the knowledge that at least this time he was with his friends. Most of them, he thought bitterly. 

He picked through dinner in the mess hall at the War Rooms, knowing he needed the calories after everything he’d been through yet unable to find the desire to eat--God, he kept realizing, he’d been completely transformed, but his mind refused it, too incredible to be believed. At night Bucky took Steve back to their quarters and tossed their thin mattresses--was his too small for him now? probably--on the floor with the threadbare blankets and the flimsy pillows and said, “You might be big now, but we can still put the cushions on the floor like when you were little.” Steve curled up on his side and Bucky arched around him, arm across Steve’s chest, and for the first time since that day in the theatre, Steve knew he was safe.

### 4\. The way we look to a distant constellation

Their plane was getting ready to land in Washington, D.C., when Steve woke up. He stretched luxuriously and glanced out the window. They’d never ridden in a plane before, neither he nor Bucky, but the excitement of it hadn’t won out over his exhaustion and the still-new experience of mastering this strange, enhanced body. Everything happened faster for Steve: hunger, sleepiness, excitement. 

Steve had laughed at the reactions from some of the boys when they found out their pilot was a woman; she’d told a slightly panicked Dernier, who was already terrified of flying, that she ferried planes back and forth for the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots all the time and hadn’t lost anyone yet. She and Peggy had hit it off tremendously, and Peggy had spent much of the flight up front, Steve sneaking admiring glances at her every once in a while.

They circled over the Mall, most of its lawn covered by large makeshift shelters, temporary housing for people working in the War Department and branches of the service. You almost couldn’t see the Reflecting Pool, but you could see the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, a lifelong dream for Steve, and what he thought must be the Lincoln Memorial. It was a beautiful city from the air, no tall skyscrapers or the layer of grime that dimmed New York, the circles and diagonal roads that L’Enfant had sprinkled throughout making it look like a constellation, and its many white buildings shone brightly in the sun. 

Steve elbowed Bucky and pointed out the window, Bucky leaned over to watch as they came in for a landing. Cars waited to take them to the Willard Hotel, a place so swanky that Steve couldn’t have imagined even being allowed to set foot in there, let alone stay overnight--and with housing at such an incredible premium here, it was a luxury to have only two of them per room. They were, he thought, VIPs in a city filled with them, which did fizzy things to his head.

Somehow it felt almost more surreal than when he’d first stood up in that soundstage in Hollywood. There was a basket of fruit--fresh apples and pears and bananas, none of which they’d seen for days and days--on the desk and Bucky tore into it with glee. Steve watched as juice from a pear trickled down Bucky’s chin to his neck, the way his throat moved as he swallowed, and looked away with shame when Bucky grinned at him and offered him an apple. The room became rather abruptly too close, too small. “Ain’t this the life?” Bucky said and laughed, a slight bitter edge to it Steve couldn’t help noticing. “I oughta travel with you more often, big shot.”

“Aw, Buck, cut it out.”

“I think they got big plans for you now, hero. Big plans for that big body.” 

“And my big mind, don’t forget that.” He grinned and swatted Bucky on the arm, then said, “Let’s get some chow before they take us to the meeting. I’m starving in this big body.”

All of the boys came along to the new Pentagon building, which Steve was grateful for--how quickly he’d come to depend on them to calm his jitters--but they separated him and Bucky from them for the meeting. They were ushered into a conference room with what seemed like half the brass of the armed forces along with a few senators and congresspeople, as well as Peggy, the colonel, and Howard Stark. 

It took Steve forever, though, to grasp what they were telling him: that Captain America the comic book hero was based on the very real Project Rebirth that Steve had just undergone, that it was all designed to--“Make it less of a surprise when it really happened?” he asked, stupefied.

“That’s a somewhat reductive way to put it, but yes,” the general to the right of Peggy said. “We could only keep it classified and under wraps for so long, we knew that. Supersoldiers would be difficult to ignore. Imagine the furor that would erupt when people saw that something like the Red Skull really existed, that things beyond the boundaries of nature were happening all around them. It would be impossible to contain.”

“So they go to the pictures one day and see an army of supersoldiers runnin’ around the battlefields of Europe in the newsreels,” Bucky said, shaking his head, “and suddenly it don’t seem quite so far-fetched after a few years of comics and the serials.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” Colonel Phillips said, and smiled at Bucky like he was his favorite son. 

Howard cleared his throat. “The thing is, that submersible Rogers found was years beyond any technology even I can currently create. Hitler and Schmidt shared an interest in the occult and Teutonic myth, Erskine said, but only one of ’em has found out that the myth is reality. Whatever Schmidt’s got powering those weapons and that submersible doesn’t come from this planet.”

The man sitting next to Steve snorted. “This isn’t crazy enough for you already, with people dropping into pictures and supersoldiers and monsters?”

“Look, bub, I’m not some screenwriter, I didn’t make this up,” Howard snapped, peevish any time someone questioned him.

“And yet all of you expect us to believe that one supersoldier can take this--this Hydra organization on? Your experiment failed. He’s not enough.”

“He’s been tested more than you, pal. I didn’t see you running around Italy, rescuing four hundred men when you were barely big enough for your rifle. Imagine what he can do now.” Howard had such a smug face that it almost made Steve laugh out loud.

But Steve figured it was best to cut this off; arguing about his capabilities wouldn’t get them anywhere. “But I don’t see how I--well--”

“Neither do we,” one of the senators said. “Because we went from ‘outside the boundaries of nature’ to full-on magic, with you and Mr. Gardner and however the hell you got to Italy. Pardon my French,” he said to the lady colonel at the end of the table and to Peggy, who arched her perfect eyebrow. Steve hated patronizing assholes like that and he glared at him hostilely; under the table Bucky kicked his ankle in warning.

“But here you are,” someone else added, “and as Mr. Stark has pointed out, you’re a proven quantity and the only successful candidate from Dr. Erskine’s program, and that means that you _are_ Captain America now, for all intents and purposes.”

“But people will know the difference. They’ll know I’m not...Grant Gardner.”

“That’s easily explained away. We can come up with another nice cover story about an actor fulfilling the role while the real Cap was off killing Nazis. Since, you know, you have in fact killed some Nazis.”

He and Bucky stared at each other; Bucky shrugged an incredibly eloquent shoulder. Then Steve glanced at Peggy, who drew her lips in a tight line, her expression unreadable, tense. Perhaps they honestly thought he would turn this down. What would happen if he did, if this was as top secret as she’d said? Maybe they’d have to kill anyone who knew the truth. 

“How does this work, then? I just go back to Europe?” Would the boys be given a chance to stay here in the States or would they have to go back to the battlefield? Oh God, would _Bucky_? How could he do that to Bucky after everything he’d endured? 

“Essentially, yes,” Peggy answered. 

“What about Grant Gardner? He died a hero. He helped me back before...the project.”

“He will have civilian service honors and his family is being well taken care of,” someone said, and Steve looked at the colonel, who nodded.

“And we’re already picking our top men to accompany you in the field,” Colonel Phillips said.

“With all due respect, Colonel, I think I already know who those men are,” Steve said, and everyone laughed, the tension broken at last. 

“You’re a commissioned officer now, Captain Rogers,” one of the generals said, standing, letting them know the briefing was over and they could go. Steve was dizzy with it, he squeezed Bucky’s wrist under the table, and Bucky squeezed back. What had Steve ever done to deserve Bucky, to deserve Peggy? To be worthy of this honor?

As they were leaving the room, Steve heard someone say, “Full-on magic? Really? That’s what you’re running with?” He thought it sounded like the president’s liaison, whom he’d heard speak only once, when they were introducing themselves.

The woman colonel answered, “You got something better, we’re all ears. Because this is the most fucked-up, crazy scenario I’ve ever heard in my goddamn life.” There’s some French for you, Steve thought, and smiled.

They all piled into their cars, went back to the hotel, Steve staring out the window, trying to take it all in. This was _really happening_ , he could no longer deny it. There was no script here, no hack writers plotting it all out. And he was still at the center of the story. 

The colonel, Howard, and Peggy took him to dinner--the fanciest meal he’d ever had--to discuss plans, outline what his role would be, how they would operate as the SSR with Captain America and the Howling Commandos out in the field, and the weapons Howard would develop for them. His attention wandered occasionally, he caught himself staring at Peggy, the way her chestnut hair fell around her shoulders when she wore it nonregulation, the crimson lipstick on her full mouth, how huge her warm brown eyes were. 

Steve offered to walk her back to her room afterward, but she said that she and the colonel had some talking to do, so he’d gone off in search of the men. Time to ask them the difficult question: could they sign back up and put their lives on the line once more, this time for him? Could he be that selfish and arrogant as to ask? Steve could never do what he needed to over there with strangers assigned by the brass. 

What shocked him was how readily they agreed to it. He found them drinking in the Round Bar, boisterous and ill-suited to the crowd of stuffed-shirt politicians and ladies in hats and gloves, socialites who had no sense of what these men really went through for them. And though they’d seen him at his most inept, they threw in with him eagerly, happily. 

Bucky sat apart from them, staring into the bottom of a glass at the bar, flouting uniform regulations with missing tie and open collar. Thank God there were no MPs here. 

“What about you? You willing to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” Steve asked as he slid in next to Bucky at the bar. 

“Hell no,” Bucky said and sipped his whiskey. For a second Steve’s heart stalled, his throat got tight, until Bucky added with an odd cryptic smile, “That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight, I’m following him.” The sun suddenly filled the dark bar and Steve dropped his head, trying not to let Bucky see his piercing happiness. “But you gonna keep that outfit with the tights?” he added in a tone so suggestive that Steve almost fell right off the stool. What--why would Bucky say such a thing? The way Bucky arched his eyebrow and--God, he was leering, he really was--leaned toward Steve couldn’t mean anything else. Maybe Steve was inexperienced, but he wasn’t _stupid_.

Steve shook his head and tried on a faltering smile. “You know what? It was sort of growing on me.”

In the corner the fellas were laughing about something, Bucky touched his arm, saying, “Come on,” and they went to join them. They shook each other’s hands, laughing and slapping each other on the back, maybe all of them thinking they were positively nuts for signing on, when Bucky said, “Hey, everyone, let’s hear it for Captain America.” They gave him a round of cheers, hoisting their drinks in his honor and clapping him on the back. Everyone was watching them but he couldn’t care--it was too gratifying, unlike anything he’d known before, and he soared. That was shattered when he raised his eyes toward Bucky and saw the sorrow on his face, Bucky’s mouth drawn into a frown, until he saw Steve looking at him and he smiled again--it didn’t reach his eyes as he glanced around the room, unable to meet Steve’s own. 

“What do you say we head out on the town?” Dugan asked, and slammed his beer on the table, wiping his moustache off. “I hear tell of something called Patriot Parties, where the ladies _love_ to entertain the G.I.s in their homes.” 

“I heard someone say the nightlife here’s pretty dismal,” Gabe said. “But there’s gotta be a few dancehalls out there.” As they were leaving the table, the room seemed to fall silent, and Steve turned to see Peggy, stunning in a scarlet dress that nearly matched her lipstick and hugged every curve on her body. He almost choked. 

“Ma’am,” Bucky said as Steve attempted to recover. Bucky had always been so smooth with the ladies, probably since he was about eight years old. She didn’t even look at Bucky or the boys, though. 

“Colonel Phillips requests the pleasure of your company, oh eight hundred tomorrow. Yet more briefings.” She finally glanced toward the men and smirked. “I see this top squad of yours is prepping for duty.”

“We were just about to head out on the town. Uh, maybe go to a club, hear some music.” Steve sounded so phony, he was not practiced at this. “Maybe you could join us?”

“Another time, I’m afraid.”

“You don’t like music?” Bucky asked.

“On the contrary. Otherwise engaged. A few of my chums are here in Washington, working for the War Department. One of them is marrying a Yank soon. We wanted to catch up, a bit of a hen party as it were.” She smiled at Steve and he felt like he was in an elevator car that had just had its cable cut.

“Maybe they could join us,” Steve offered.

“Perhaps,” she said, but he could tell she didn’t want to, which made sense, because how often did she have the chance to be around other women instead of a bunch of smelly, loud fellas. He thought of her and the pilot on the plane over.

“Might be some dancing,” Bucky prodded. “Don’t like dancing?”

“Not at all, I quite like it. I might even, when this is all over, indulge myself.”

“Well, then, what are we waiting for?” Bucky asked, and glanced over at Steve. 

“The right partner,” she said, and Steve thought he was going to burst into flames. He could scarcely believe she’d remembered what he’d said to her that night in the truck, that he hadn’t misunderstood the way she’d looked at him and spoken to him and touched him. That she might want him the way he wanted her. She smiled and turned to go as every head in the bar turned as well, watching her walk away. “Oh eight hundred,” she said, and paused, then laughed. “Captain.”

“I can’t fucking believe it,” Bucky groused, rolling his eyes. “I’m turning into you. This is a nightmare.”

“Thanks, asshole,” Steve said, and punched him on the shoulder. “You really know how to make a guy feel great.” Bucky shook his head and followed him out of the bar, and the group of them went off to investigate the riches the city had to offer.

They found a little nightclub off Thomas Circle where jitterbuggers were in high gear, and despite a few tense moments getting Morita and Gabe inside, once they were in, it was a ball. As their new CO, Steve knew he probably shouldn’t have been out with them at all, but it was important to him that the squad cohere, even through recreation. He’d been thinking about it all day--how difficult it would be to follow the fraternization rules with such a specialized team, especially if it meant separating himself from Bucky. He simply couldn’t envision it. 

And it was marvelous, watching Bucky dance. Steve had only occasionally gone out dancing with Bucky on double dates and seen him in motion. Even as tormented and messed up as he’d been since the rescue, Bucky was loose and alive and confident as soon as he took a girl’s hand and started moving across the floor. Once in a while Bucky would turn his gaze to Steve, that same suggestive twinkle in his eye that had been there before, and they would stare for a long time until something snapped Steve back to reality. 

Eventually it was clear that at least half of the group were too drunk to move well on their own power and half were heading off with some lovely local girls, so Steve and Bucky got cabs to take them back to the hotel. Steve considered knocking on Peggy’s door, but he had no idea what he would say--he was no more capable of flirting in this new body than he’d been before, and he wasn’t at all comfortable with doing anything that could put Peggy in a compromising position--so he and Bucky made sure everyone else was safely in their rooms before turning in themselves.

There was an evening paper on the desk in their room, a front-page story about the real Captain America saving the lives of more than four hundred men and a picture of Steve in his hastily acquired officer’s uniform. He would have been dumbstruck and crimson with embarrassment if not for Bucky giving him a hard time, throwing his dirty socks at Steve’s head as he undressed, telling him not to let it go to his big fat head. The people at the briefing had done exactly what they said they were going to do: shifted the fiction into the realm of truth, even if Steve himself still hadn’t figured out what the truth was, exactly. At the end of the article there was a sidebar explaining how Grant Gardner would no longer be playing Cap in the pictures, yet no mention of his true sacrifice, and Steve’s throat grew tight, his eyes stinging. 

Bucky saw what he’d been reading and said, “Oh.” He made that face, the one he always made when Steve was suffering, so tender and dear, and then put his hand on the back of Steve’s neck. “You got to know him pretty well, didn’t you?” Steve nodded, afraid he might cry if he said anything, so Bucky added, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for either of you, I shouldn’t have left. Maybe I could have helped. It was just--I was having a hard time with it.”

“I know,” Steve responded after he got hold of himself. “Do you still think I’m not me anymore?” He was afraid to meet Bucky’s eyes and see what he might find there, so he pressed his forehead to Bucky’s. Would Bucky shove him away, had the way he looked at Steve--the things he’d _said_ \--been merely wishful thinking on Steve’s part? 

“It’s only been a couple days, you gotta give me some time to make up my mind, jackass.” Bucky huffed out a laugh and pulled Steve’s head into the crook of his neck, and even though Steve now had a couple inches and a lot of pounds on Bucky, it felt familiar, and true, and like he was _home_. Bucky said, “I’m different too, now. I feel like they hollowed me out with a serving spoon and scooped out everything that made me me.”

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to you before. That whatever it was that brought me over there couldn’t save you from that--from the torture.” Steve could barely speak the word, the thought of them doing those things to Bucky churned his insides until he thought he might gag. Steve breathed deep, the way Bucky had taught him. “I think everyone in that meeting today figured the reason it happened was so I could become the real supersoldier, but I think it was because I was supposed to find you. I was so afraid you were dead. But it had such a cost...”

“That’s not your fault, Steve. You gotta stop thinking like that. Just because you’re at the center of whatever this shit is don’t make it your fault.” Bucky put both his hands on either side of Steve’s face. “I’m so glad you found me. I’m never going anywhere you can’t find me again. You hear me? We’re gonna take care of each other. You’re never going anywhere without me, and I ain’t going anywhere without you. Like I said.”

Steve put his hands on top of Bucky’s and finally looked him in the eye. He wondered if this was a test, too, if it would all fall apart, but he couldn’t stand it anymore and he leaned forward to press his lips to Bucky’s. If it _was_ a test this was apparently the right answer, because Bucky cupped his palm to the back of Steve’s head and returned the kiss so long and deep that Steve’s head swam. He thought he must be at best only an adequate kisser, since this was the first real kiss he’d had, but it hardly mattered because Bucky was _spectacular_. Of course he was. Time stretched out around them, he had no idea how long they kissed, but finally Bucky pulled back and stared at him. His cheeks were flushed, his blue eyes as bright as the North Star, and his mouth was shiny and wet and red. Little curlicues of pleasure twisted and darted around in Steve’s lower belly; he reached out and brushed Bucky’s hair off his forehead, winding his fingers through it, so thick and soft. 

“You gotta be up and at ’em in a couple hours, you know,” Bucky said, and Steve shook his head. _No, please keep kissing me forever._

“No way I’m sleeping now.” He kissed Bucky’s palm, held it warm against his cheek.

“Yeah, you are. I’m your fucking NCO. It’s my job to look after you.”

Steve laughed. “Wasn’t it always?”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

“Dernier already giving you French lessons?” Steve delighted in the idea of Bucky learning languages; Bucky’d always been so smart and such an adept mimic that it made sense he’d pick things up over here.

“Jones. And don’t change the subject.” Maybe Bucky was afraid of what came next. That was okay, Steve was a little afraid too--and how it fit with his feelings for Peggy. There were worlds opening up for him now that he couldn’t have imagined before, and it overpowered his sense of self. Yet Bucky had always seen Steve with clear eyes, so if Bucky thought they should cool it now, then he would listen. “We got time, Steve. For all of this, and finding out what it means. We’re together now. I’m with you to the end, wherever that is. I’ve always told you that.”

God, it would be wonderful if they could stay here forever, not return to the front but just hole up in this hotel, safe and warm, but this was what he’d been created for, this was what Erskine and Gardner had given their lives for. He owed them a debt beyond price.

Whatever this magic had in store for them, Steve had to find out. At least they could find out together. Nothing could stop them now.

 

**December, 1944**

 

She found him in an old stables not far from the War Rooms, its horses long since gone. The only occupants now were newborn cats nestled into the old straw, and Steve sat on a brokedown bench playing with one of the teeny tiny kittens, the mother watching him from near his feet. Steve couldn’t imagine how Peggy’d tracked him here, but she was a spy, after all. 

He didn’t look up when she said, “They’re ready for you. Final briefing on the half hour.”

“All right,” he said, and twirled his index finger around and around as the kitten batted at it. Its eyes probably hadn’t even been open that long, so adorably clumsy.

“Steve,” Peggy began, and then stopped. She rested her hand on his shoulder. 

“Did you know that I was deathly allergic to horses? Before. Found that out the hard way when I was little and the iceman was gonna let me feed his horse a mushy apple. Had to take me to the hospital. I was allergic to cats, too, of course. And I wouldn’t have been able to sit here like this, with all this old straw around. I’d have been wheezing and clawing at the air. My ma used to--Bucky used to--”

Peggy sat down and leaned against him, running her finger over the kitten’s back, then dropped her head onto Steve’s shoulder.

“I can’t even remember how many times I had last rites said for me. Sort of lost count after a while.” 

She sighed. “I know it wasn’t enough, to simply say prayers for him. That you would have wished for the time to have a service, or to be with his family at theirs.” He reached over and took her hand, holding the kitten up under his chin, listening to its tiny little purr.

“People always looked at me like I was such a waste. They didn’t pick on me because I was small so much as because I was...worthless. A drain on society’s resources, like I’d never be able to support myself, or contribute. That’s why I was always so angry. Why I fought so hard. The only ones who never judged me were Ma and Bucky, Bucky’s family. He saw firsthand what a struggle it was. Knew as well as I did that I probably wouldn’t live to see thirty-five. But he told me once that he was with me to the end of the line. He told me that plenty.”

She inhaled, deep and bone-weary, a mirror of his own state. What a disappointment he must be to her now that she’d seen how easily he fell apart, at the pub, here. After a few minutes Peggy took the kitten from him and put it back with its mother, then pulled his head down against her neck, stroking his hair. He watched as the mother licked her baby, the careful way she nudged it into the pile with her other children. Her little family.

“You two were the only ones who ever saw me for who I really was, then and now, and liked them both.” Peggy rubbed her cheek against his hair. Would Erskine still have been proud of him? Would his ma?

“That’s where you’re wrong. The men do too.” 

Maybe she was right, but they didn’t know him the way she did, the way Bucky did. “I used to wonder if I could have a life with both of you. If it was even something I could have asked for.” Steve wasn’t sure Peggy would understand his meaning; hell, he wasn’t sure he even understood what he was saying. Yet there had been so many sleepless nights, contemplating what his future might look like when he loved two people as much as he did Peggy and Bucky.

“Yes, I think you could have.” Steve heard the steady heartbeat in her chest and its rhythm calmed him. “You’re extraordinary, though I know you don’t believe that. Barnes knew that, I know that. I think we both should have been fortunate to share a life with you.”

Steve could argue with her, tell her that an extraordinary man wouldn’t have gotten the person he loved most in the world killed. Would never have asked him to follow him back into the hell he’d escaped from, barely even alive. She had that same stubborn belief in Steve that Bucky’d always shown, unshakeable faith and devotion that came from someplace he didn’t even know, had never seen. Why had he been brought here? Steve wondered every minute after Bucky had fallen. Had all this happened just so Steve could save Bucky and then wring everything out of him until he was dead?

It had felt like a blessing for so long. Steve twined his fingers with Peggy’s and sat up, giving her a false smile. Peggy pressed her forehead to his, just the way Bucky used to. It may have been a curse, instead, but at least he had this still, at least he had Peggy Carter. 

Regrets were a luxury in wartime. Still, they ate at him now--particularly the confidence he and Bucky had that there would be time to discover what their relationship could become. Did Bucky even know, at the end, how much Steve loved him? He remembered, after they’d gotten Zola off the train and rendezvoused with the rest of the men, walking away and standing at the edge of that chasm, unable to pinpoint the location where Bucky had fallen. Bucky had been his life, Bucky had been his _home_ , and would Steve ever know what that felt like again? He could swear he’d heard an answer in the evening air, and it sounded like “never.”

He stood and offered his hand to Peggy. 

“Come on, let’s go get Schmidt.” 

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Steve had concocted a number of scenarios in his mind for how he might wake up from this phantasmagoria he’d stepped into, whenever destiny was done with him and he was spit back out into the theatre like Dorothy returned from Oz. There was: Steve is rousted by the theatre usher for falling asleep while drunk, and it’s time to get his scrawny rump outa there, they’re closing for the night, what the hell, fella, you some kinda lush.

or

Steve’s in the drunk tank of the nearest hoosegow, waking up with the meanest hangover he’s ever had, and it’s still Brooklyn and he’s still tiny.

or

Steve wakes up in a mental ward, wearing a straightjacket, insisting to the doctors that he hasn’t gone mad, he really was inside a movie and he really saved four hundred men, you just have to look at the papers, it _must_ be in the papers.

It was never: Steve’s in the cockpit of a giant plane loaded with bombs built by a red-skulled madman, headed straight for his hometown, and the only thing he can do is crash it into uninhabited territory as Peggy talks to him on the radio from a thousand miles away, and Bucky is dead, Bucky is dead, fallen into a snowy chasm never to return, his body unrecoverable, lost to Steve forever.

Schmidt had kept yammering about the power of the gods. As Steve had watched that cosmic cube sinking through the floor of the plane, down into the Atlantic, he’d wondered: could that be what had brought him here? Was that the magic that had given him this body but cost him Bucky? It was far too dear of a price.

But maybe now, oh, now the story was coming to an end. He hadn’t had a choice when it began. This was his choice now. Steve put the compass with Peggy’s picture on the control panel.

“A week next Saturday at the Stork Club,” Peggy said over the radio, and he could see her, with her carmine-red lipstick and that heavy leather jacket and her trousers bloused into her boots and he loved her, God he loved her so much. She was so strong and so beautiful and it would be all right for her, it really would, she could carry on without him. 

“You got it.”

“Eight o’clock on the dot. Don’t you dare be late. Understood?”

The ice rushed up to meet Steve, he could feel the force of the plane’s velocity tearing at the structure, tearing at him. “You know I still don’t know how to dance.”

A lengthy pause, and he caught her grief flowing out along the airwaves, caught it and held it close, tangible, like the blue wisps from the cosmic cube. At least they had this fantasy with which to say goodbye. “I’ll show you how, just be there.”

So close now, white as far as the eye could see. “We’ll have the band play something slow. I’d hate to step on your toes,” Steve said, but he wasn’t sure she heard him as the plane slammed into the ice and sheared into pieces with the final words still in his mouth.

Serials always ended in cliffhangers, that’s why Steve didn’t like them. If his story had been a real movie, it would have had a happy ending. He thought of Gardner, so put-upon as he tried to live Cap’s character; Erskine’s wry, knowing, gentle smile. The boys and their weary yet cheerful faces. Peggy’s red dress and silken brown hair. The love in Bucky’s eyes when he’d touched Steve’s cheek, and the way Ma had pushed the hair from his forehead and bent to kiss him there.

The freezing water filled the cockpit as the plane sank beneath the ice. Steve took one last breath and laughed as he recalled a frosty evening in France and Jim Morita closing the flap on his tent, saying, “Tonight, I dream in Technicolor.”

 

**2015**

 

“...and that’s the absolutely true story of how I really became Captain America.”

Everyone stared at Steve. Clint threw a handful of popcorn at him. “Boooo.” Threw another handful. “Are you freaking kidding me? I don’t believe it for a minute. You’re totally making that up.”

“I swear to God. It’s completely true. I have backup. Right, Buck?” Steve asked, and Bucky gave a slight nod. Bucky was still awkward around the whole group but definitely improving; as long as no one expected him to talk, he could hang out, and Steve always felt better when he had eyes on Bucky. It was a hard line to walk, giving Bucky the room he needed to heal and be his own person, but to keep him close, to take care of him the way Bucky’d always cared for Steve. “And Morita’s still going strong, so I could call him up right now.”

“That is _not_ what we grew up with in school,” Sam said, but added hastily, “which is not to say you’re lying, because I know you wouldn’t, but still. Cognitive dissonance, dude.”

“Aside from the fact that it was an implausible story--even I know that--there was also the fact that it was ultra top secret, eyes only, for decades. Eventually all the people who were the eyes had died.” Steve put his hands out, palms up. Natasha glanced at him in sympathy, aware of who that list included.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Look, I get that these are the days of miracle and wonder, this is the long distance call, etcetera, the rest of the lyrics, but come on. Magic, really, in World War Two? Wasn’t global slaughter enough of a story? And how come my dad never once talked about that when he talked about you? Believe me, he talked about you a lot.” 

Steve laughed at Tony’s never-ending resentment over that. Natasha raised an eyebrow and looked at Thor. 

“Asgardians?” she asked. 

“Perhaps. Though I have never heard any tales about such a thing--and creating magic on Midgard such as Steven encountered, where a fantasy becomes reality, would make a delightful story. It would require great power, however, and I would think someone should have boasted about it if they were responsible.” He thought for a moment. “But I shall ask Heimdall, as I am deeply intrigued. Some realms are still less known to us. And the Fates, they are capricious. Someday I shall tell you a few tales of my own.” He grinned and slapped Steve on the back.

He didn’t want to bring it up in front of the others, but Steve had far more questions for Thor than who might have started it. But first he had to share it with Bucky. Steve said, “Knock yourself out.” He really hoped it hadn’t involved Thor’s awful brother. “But if I never know? I’m okay with that. I always believed movies should have a happy ending, and I got one,” Steve said, gazing at Bucky, a contented smile on his face.

Pepper suddenly set her glass on the coffee table with a loud thunk and went to the windows on the west side of the tower. She was fanning her face, and Steve meant to go to her but Tony leapt up and beat him to it. “Honey?” Tony asked, and she turned around, blinking back tears. “What’s wrong?”

After a few seconds, she seemed to get hold of herself. “Do you even realize what this _means_?” The speed of the fanning increased. 

“No?” Clint said, and Sam laughed out loud. Sam whispered to Clint, “Dude, I feel like I’m at a boy band concert.”

“Maybe a teensy clue for the clueless?” Tony asked her. 

“It means destiny and fate are real,” Pepper cried. “It’s not just an airy concept or some romantic abstract notion we talk about in poetry and song lyrics. It’s kismet. Don’t you see?”

Bruce grinned. “Yeah. Yeah. This was--Steve, whatever force plopped you into that movie and then in Italy, it had a plan. To rescue the doctor, and Bucky. And then for you to become the exact, perfect test subject they needed. And to be on that plane and save the world. Someone wanted that to happen. Needed you specifically.”

“Oh!” Maria added excitedly. “Yeah, and for you to be discovered in the ice and wake up exactly when you did, and work for SHIELD so you would find the information that led you to see Barnes that day, and we could blow the helicarriers, and get Barnes away from Hydra. All these stepping stones on a path.” She smiled fondly at Bucky. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bring that up. It’s just...”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said, “I’m all right talking about it.” Steve beamed at him. Even a few months ago Bucky’d have hidden behind the curtain of his hair when they talked to him, drawn in on himself, rarely making eye contact. Steve had suspected for a while that the ladies were a lot easier for Bucky to deal with, though. He’d always loved the ladies, and the ladies loved him.

“And you saved him,” Pepper said to Bucky. “All of this was set in motion so you could both save the world, and save each other. Oh God!” She fanned her face furiously again. Tears were glistening on her cheeks. “It’s so romantic!”

“And tragic? Right, babe?” Tony prompted. “We haven’t forgotten the terrible trauma, have we. The torture.”

“No, no, of course not! I’m sorry, I just--it’s tragic, it really is, what happened was _awful_ , and yet. You’re here together. It’s just so romantic.”

“Yes!” Thor thundered in agreement, apparently giving up on using his indoor voice. “Quite romantic. All the greatest heroic ballads include tragedy as well. I will tell this tale on Asgard to celebrate you both!”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Steve said. “No need.” He glanced at Bucky. It had been a long night for them both and Bucky looked done in. “But I’m glad to have had the chance to tell you guys, at long last. It’s been a fun night. I haven’t really thought about it a lot lately. It seemed so distant, sometimes.” He jerked his head toward the door and Bucky got up to follow him out.

“Well, great,” Tony whined. “Now Weepy McWeepersons here will be sniffling in my ear all night and making moony eyes. Thanks a bunch.”

Bucky smiled. “You’re welcome.” The way they all gawped was a jolt of glee.

He and Bucky held hands as they left the room, in the elevator, into their apartment. The first time Bucky had taken his hand, Steve had gone dizzy, and he still got tiny thrills of electricity that cascaded up and down his spine every time. He had no illusions: after everything Bucky had been through, it was entirely probable he might not want more than this, or sharing the bed as they did most nights, and that was okay--Steve wasn’t always certain _he_ wanted more than this, because it was past what he could have hoped for. Sex--or the idea of sex, since they had never gone that far--was not the most important piece of their relationship, never had been. It was only the privilege of having Bucky here that mattered, looking at him, hearing his voice, taking care of each other.

Steve busied himself with putting away dishes, knowing that Bucky was watching him, waiting until he figured out how to say what he wanted to. 

“Why now?” Bucky eventually asked, and Steve looked at him. “Why after all this time are you telling them that story?” Steve straightened and went to the credenza in the corner of the dining room, pulling out a file folder.

“After Peggy--after she passed,” Steve said, feeling that familiar sting behind his eyes, the heat in his throat, and Bucky touched his arm tenderly, waiting for him to collect himself. He wiped at his eyes. “Sharon was going through some things, and she found this. At first she didn’t know what it meant, only that at some point, Peggy had brought this home to keep privately, away from SHIELD.” Steve fidgeted. Might as well throw it all out there, since this seemed to be a night for dredging up the past. “I wasn’t really expecting the topic to come up tonight with everyone, I thought it was just going to be a nice quiet get-together among the group. But that story has been on my mind ever since I read this. And I think that--I think you’re doing well enough that you can handle it. I can’t help feeling it’s as important for you to know this as it was important for them to understand what really happened.”

They sat on the sofa with the file on Bucky’s lap. It wasn’t thick, but Bucky took a long time reading through the first pages, studying them like there’d be a test afterward. Eventually he looked up at Steve with a mix of disbelief and confusion. “I don’t understand. They recovered some of the--the shit they tortured me with in Austria? They _tested it out?_ ”

Steve breathed deep and exhaled raggedly, took Bucky’s hand. “You remember how I told you--well, maybe you don’t. I know there’s still a lot you don’t remember.” Bucky squeezed his fingers. Over the years he’d been back, Steve’d heard so many people casually say “my brain’s a sieve,” but Bucky’s really was--so much had been sifted out of his consciousness, perhaps never to return. “When I was in that theatre, it was...strange. I never told many people this, but I kept hearing these spooky, weird noises. There was a strange energy before Dugan said something to me from the screen, but I thought it was because I was half in the bag and angry and feeling all sorts of sorry for myself. I kept thinking I heard you say my name.” Bucky stared at him, open-mouthed, for some time before returning his eyes to the file folder.

The top memo was written by one of the SSR scientists who’d worked with Howard Stark. He’d been sent to the factory to sift through and find anything that was still viable, long after Steve and Bucky were gone. Most of the factory had exploded in the aftermath of their escape, but the back part of the building had been somewhat protected by its old, thick brick walls. Some of Zola’s lab, more importantly some of his files, had remained intact, and meanwhile, the SSR had been sweating Zola in a prison in the United States. Before he would be freed and find his way back to Hydra in Russia, before he would destroy Bucky. 

_. . . and we believe two of these machines were designed for experimentation with brain activity and/or mental conditioning. One of the machines was unsalvageable, but the other may have been used on the only living test subject from the Hydra facility (see file 2439307: Barnes, James B., Tech. Sgt.). Both were powered by the energy source used in the recovered weapons from various attacks by Hydra soldiers, characterized by a brilliant blue light from the Tesseract._

Steve squeezed his hand, and Bucky looked up at him. “Do you want to keep reading?”

Bucky swallowed but nodded his head. The rest of the reports and memos indicated that after extensive study of Zola’s personal notes and interrogation, the scientists had decided to take volunteers among themselves in order to see what the machine did. If Howard and his team had taught Steve anything, it was that scientists were certifiably nuts--they willingly tested things on themselves that no person in their right mind would undergo, and they often completely lost sight of what was moral or right in their quest to find out if they could do something. While Howard was relentlessly combing the Atlantic for Steve and retrieving the Tesseract, his assistants were putting themselves under the very machine that had killed who knew how many Allied servicemen and nearly destroyed Bucky completely.

Bucky’s breathing altered as he read through the memos, faster and shallower, until he got to the part Steve most wanted him to see and then he almost stopped breathing entirely.

_The machine seems to amplify thoughts, almost functioning as a long-range radio transmitter for emotions when the person subjected to the machine is in a heightened state of anxiety and/or physical distress. . . .Subjects reported receiving sounds or “feelings” from as far away as the United States, although most didn’t understand what was happening (nor, frankly, do we). . . .We have great concerns that an enemy, if they understood this unexpected function and were able to create such a machine, could breach even the strongest currently available security and transmit actual detailed information this way._

_. . .using Zola’s copious notes and interrogation reports, we have linked the sensations Captain Rogers described in the Brooklyn theatre with Sgt. Barnes’s responses to the torture and experimentation he was enduring at the exact same moment in time. Zola was completely unaware of this bizarre secondary function in the machine, his notes only indicate in clinical fashion that Barnes repeatedly called out one name when he was in pain or in a state of delirium, that of “Steve,” which obviously refers to Captain Steve Rogers. Zola’s primary concern was discovering what kind of mental reshaping of human test subjects the machine could perform, and his understanding of the cosmic cube was primarily focused on weapons capacity. Whatever unearthly powers the cube imparted to this machine, they were concentrated with Barnes, for reasons we do not yet know. As both Rogers and Barnes are listed MIA and no remains have been found, we will probably never know. I hesitate to refer to any of this as “magic,” but that seems to be the only word we have at this point in our examination, as this technology is beyond our current understanding._

_It’s our conclusion that this machine, being powered by an alien force that we have no current ability to understand, is far too dangerous to national, possibly even world, security and should be dismantled, and all diagrams and blueprints be destroyed. Until we are better able to comprehend the power and nature of the cosmic cube, this machine represents_

Bucky didn’t finish reading. He stared at Steve and tossed the folder on the table, his face unreadable. “Is this--this is saying that I was calling out to you and you heard me.” 

“Yeah.”

“That’s bananas.”

“I know. But it’s like Tony was saying a few minutes ago--age of miracles and wonder. I mean, look at us. Thor. Loki. Cosmic cubes. Alien armies from fuckin’ outer space. We were just ahead of our time, you and me.”

Bucky laughed, and Steve blinked at him--it was the first honest to God laugh he’d heard from Bucky since he’d come back to New York with them. 

Steve said, “Some _thing_ , some _one_ believed I was meant for better things. Wanted me to go over there and find you. Maybe they thought...I don’t know, maybe they thought I was the only one who could do that.”

“That’s what Potts said: destiny. Fate.” Bucky shook his head. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Steve grinned at him, and Bucky scooted closer to him on the sofa. 

“It had to wait seventy fuckin’ years?” Bucky asked, eyebrows drawn down.

“Right? I would have liked to have seen the ’60s, I think.”

“Me too,” Bucky said, dry as the Mojave desert. Steve burst out laughing and took his hand.

“That’s one reason I want to talk to Thor about all this, privately. What we consider magical or, I don’t know, miraculous is just everyday science to Asgardians. I’m curious what he’ll say about these files.”

“So. The machine that they used on me,” Bucky began, throat muscles moving up and down in an effort to swallow, the hand clenching Steve’s a tender vise, “it wasn’t the same. Because he didn’t have the cosmi--the Tesseract anymore. If he’d been able to use it, to make another machine like that, I wonder if you would have heard me back then.” He closed his eyes, trying with every trembling muscle in his body to keep a lid on it. 

The decisions whether to touch and for how long Steve left entirely up to Bucky, but this time he thought he’d take a chance and slipped his arms around him, pulling Bucky’s face against his shoulder, curling fingers through his hair. Bucky pressed tight to him. “I wondered that too. If I could have heard you through the ice. God, I’m so sorry, Buck. To leave you there, to not come back for you. To not hear you. You always found me when I was in trouble, and I couldn’t do the same for you.” Shit, he didn’t want to cry, that always distressed Bucky way too much, but the tears that had started when he’d mentioned Peggy were there at the corners of his eyes and he couldn’t stop them.

“That wasn’t why I was asking, for fuck’s sake.” There was a twilit, melancholy tone in Bucky’s voice that made him seem so distant even within the circle of Steve’s arms. 

“I know, it’s just...” He kissed Bucky’s temple, Bucky sighed into his neck, and then Steve knew it was all right, would be all right from now on and he might perish of happiness right there on the couch. He’d thought holding hands with Bucky was the pinnacle of delight, but this was...a discovery, something new and old at the same time: magic. “I will always find you now, Buck. The way you always found me when I needed you.”

Bucky pulled away and gave Steve a bittersweet smile, wiping his thumb along Steve’s eyes. “You know, there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t have become what they made me way back then in that factory, if you hadn’t found me first. So maybe whoever was in charge of this thing was playing a long game--making sure both of us were able to live long enough to be here now, like they knew one of us would be lost in the war. Making sure we could make it back together. That’s something, right? That’s gotta count for something.”

They had been battered and broken by time and circumstance, in this century and the last, but here they were, together. “It does. It’s _everything_. An ending and a beginning.”

Bucky leaned forward and kissed him, warm and fond. Steve sighed against Bucky’s mouth. This was an outcome he had never dared hope for from the time he’d first discovered Bucky was alive. But honestly, movies were just no good if they didn’t have a happy ending.

**Author's Note:**

> The [Captain America movie serials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America_\(serial\)) from Republic Pictures were actually made in 1944, and they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Cap of comic books outside of the tights: he's not in fact a supersoldier named Steve Rogers but a crime-fighting, powers-less, paunchy district attorney named Grant Gardner, and he carries a pistol instead of a mighty shield. I thought it would be fun to use the serial character's name for the actor, and to use the real serials as a basis for the made-up ones in here. The real ones are available on YouTube; they're fun to watch and kind of unintentionally hilarious to modern eyes: the first episode is all about a giant vibrator machine in an episode called The Purple Death. I ask you.
> 
> The idea for the Howling Commandos as real soldiers who are also acting in a movie came from [The Story of G.I. Joe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_G.I._Joe), a 1944 film about Ernie Pyle, the beloved war correspondent. The film's director wished to use real soldiers, who were awaiting deployment to the Pacific, as extras and have them speaking as much of the G.I. dialog as possible, and the actors were required to train and work with them for authenticity. I sort of extrapolated on that and built up the roles for the Howlies, and the title (and Jim's line) comes from the movie as well.
> 
> I stuck with the details CA:TFA gave us about a number of things, even though they bear no resemblance to real life during the war, most especially in the enlistment stuff. Voluntary enlistment ended in 1942, so Steve wouldn't have still been trying to get in when the movie takes place, let alone when this story takes place. But then, the Allies were nowhere near northern Italy either, and they couldn't have zipped back and forth to England as easily as they did in the film. Comics. What can you do.
> 
> The 14th Armored, 48th Tank Battalion (called The Liberators) Service Company was my dad's unit. The part where the Howling Commandos run into them out in the middle of nowhere is very loosely based on a story he once told me.
> 
> All the chapter headings and Tony's lyric quotation are from Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble." No, I have no idea why, it just popped into my head.
> 
> Ces pauvres diables = Those poor devils  
> Non, mais je rêve = Please let me wake up now
> 
> If you enjoyed this, [reblogs on Tumblr](http://teatotally.tumblr.com/post/132111637935/new-fic-tonight-i-dream-in-technicolor), likes, comments would be truly appreciated!


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